On the second day of Christmas, I want to share with you another Christmas song that I have no clue why I never remembered to share it on previous Christmases on here, because I’ve liked it for years. Except unlike yesterday’s and Christmas Eve’s songs, this one is not a carol, not even a traditional song, though sung by a folk singer. I truly love this song as such, and Sofia’s beautiful vocal is always a pleasure to listen to as well. She is accompanied by Martin Hederos on the piano, and I decided to share a live version. The translation below is written by Bibiels. In case someone is curious/confused about the falleri fallera fallerej thing and what it means, it’s just, what do they call it? Non-lexical vocables? lol, well, anyway, each language has some of their own, and a fair amount of Scandinavian and apparently German music as well has “falleri fallera” in it. I actually tried to find out if it still might mean something more that I was not aware of but it doesn’t seem to be the case. And here it fits because it’s about the falling snow so it is similar to the word falling (faller). Ironically, here it is rain that is falling right now and has been falling for a few hours. 😀
I’m writing a Christmas card to you now
I hope you are feeling better
That the snow is falling coolly over your worries
That you have found home
I am writing with pen on paper
Just like I did before
The cold snow is falling at my window
Against cobblestone and at the door
It’s falling white, fallera, falleri
We have a thousand memories left, falleri fallera
And we fell with the snow and the night that time
And I will never forget you, fallerej
I am writing a Christmas card to you now
And I send you a thousand little angels
Who shall watch over the children’s beds
And stroke your worry to rest
I am writing without ink and without pen
On lines that no one has seen
There are thousands of cards that were never sent
This is one of those
It’s falling white, fallera, falleri
We have a thousand memories left, falleri, fallera
And we fell with the snow and the night that time
And I will never forget you, fallerej
It’s falling white, fallera, falleri
We have a thousand memories left, falleri, fallera
Sofia Karlsson is someone whose name has already appeared on my blog, twice, actually, but both of these times it was in the context of Cornelis Vreeswijk’s music, as I shared two songs of his that she has covered. Well, today the time has come to share with you guys a song that, as far as I know, is Sofia’s original song, because it’s most definitely not just those two covers of Cornelis’ songs that I like of Sofia’s music. I think Sofia Karlsson is a great singer, and what’s interesting is that despite being a “proper” folk singer (as in, not just folk-ish and sliding on the borders of the genre) her music seems to speak not only to those who generally like folk, but to a much wider audience, because she has been a best-selling artist not only in Sweden, but apparently in Denmark and Norway as well. More interestingly, it was her album Svarta Ballader (Black Ballads) with her arrangements of poems by Dan Andersson, which has made her such a prominent artist and garnered most attention, which is surprising because as far as I know it’s not like Dan Andersson is some extremely popular and widely known Swedish poet. Also I’ve heard her music several times in our Polish Radio Programme 2, whhich, as a classical/jazz/folk/all-round sophisticated stuff radio station does admittedly play a lot of obscure music, but I feel like if some non-Polish-language and non-Anglophone folk music is played in a Polish radio station, the artist has to be someone really successful in their home country, or their music has to be incredibly accessible so that the language barrier doesn’t matter to those to whom it usually tends to do.
Sofia Karlsson is from Stockholm and comes from a very musical family. One little detail that I, being a name nerd, find very cool and interesting about her is that she has an absolutely cute middle name, and I believe a very rare one, which is Blåsippa. Blåsippa is the Swedish name for the plant that is called hepatica nobilis in Latin (no idea if it has a more English-sounding name) and I’ve never come across this name in any other situation. I really like obscure flower names as given names. And I guess it must suit her because it’s an early spring flower, and she was born in early spring as well.
I actually first heard this song thanks to my friend, back when I was still hanging around in the blind online network where I used to blog in the past and stuff. It was when I was finally able to restart my Swedish learnning and became familiar with SOfia’s music, though not all of it yet, and introduced it to said friend, who really liked it, despite speaking no Swedish. And she must have done some further digging herself, ‘cause she found this song before I became acquainted with Sofia’s entire discography, and she in turn introduced it to me and I fell in love with it instantly. I wrote a translation of it for y’all, which is probably not without errors/things that could have been put better but generally wasn’t a very difficult thing to do.
Little Lisa, you turn your gaze towards the street Towards the asphalt, last year’s leaves And the air is heavy when you breathe And tastes old and dead It drips from the lime trees’ branches You are cold and you don’t see anything But you know where you are going Go now, little Lisa, go all the way in You’re walking there so quietly in the shadow And it blends in with your hair And the twilight’s dullest colours Wrestle with the beating rain But then you hear up from the grey A bird whistling a wind And you know that now you must go Go now, little Lisa, go all the way in Sometimes the time has pockets In which you put your freezing hands A little moment of warmth A little moment to live in Little Lisa, you are upstairs in the chamber And everything feels so dirty and small You sit down at the piano Want to play for faith and for hope But the tears are falling on the keys Because you shall leave today It hurts, but you must not hesitate Go now, little Lisa, it will get worse if you stay Little Lisa, you play your tango You live your Norrland blues So the heart jumps and flies And never comes to rest Little Lisa, you must now be brave Play strong and play now For your mum in heaven, for children that shall come Go now, little Lisa, go all the way out And the lonely out on the street They live for themselves and as before Can you feel it in your chest Then you’re still human The line is already drawn Little Lisa, the forests miss you Everything can be yours now The world is waiting to show itself Little Lisa, you turn your gaze to the sky And you hope for sunlight again And I promise that it soon will get better Go now, little Lisa, go all the way home Go now, little Lisa, go all the way home
So I’m quite behind with this series, which is quite a pity, because on 12 November was one of my main fazas – Cornelis Vreeswijk’s – death anniversary. It’s been 33 years since he passed away!… As I always say, way too many! And I originally wanted to commemorate him exactly on that day but oh well… at least I can do it now.
I’ve been feeling kinda crappy lately so I chose a poem which, , between the lines – but in a way that is still easily readable – is also about feeling shitty with and about yourself, which generally is very different from how I am experiencing it yet at the same time very similar because essentially it’s all about having an overactive and spiteful self-critic and hating yourself as a result, just the ways this hatred manifests are different between different people I think.
The author of the poem, however, is not Cornelis, although as you may remember from my blog he himself was also a poet in addition to being a singer. This poem was written by an early 20th century Swedish poet Gustav Fröding, who is really loved in Sweden, although, just like Vreeswijk he was also quite controversial in his time and if I remember correctly even had an episode where he faced a trial for obscenity because of one poem he wrote. Also, again just like Vreeswijk, he had a life-long problem with alcohol as well as intimate relationships with women. Interestingly, in my Dad’s personal slang dictionary, a troll means someone who drinks heavily and chronically, like people who sit all day long near their local village shop, they’re called trolls in his language. 😀 Fröding spent a large part of his life in all sorts of mental health institutions though it’s not clear what diagnosis he had exactly, it sounds like some sort of psychotic disorder and depression, the latter ran in his family. More exactly it was his mother who suffered from it when he was a child, and as a result wasn’t able to parent him properly and so he had a rather difficult childhood. Years ago when I was learning a lot about Fröding and reading his poems simply because I knew Vreeswijk appreciated him and they appeared to have so freaking much in common (and if you’ve got any idea about fazas you know that for someone who has a faza anything even remotely related to the faza peep is interesting and worth digging into), I’ve come across an opinion that this early separation from his mother was the main factor contributing to his later problems with relationships and pretty much all the other emotional and mental health related difficulties that he was experiencing, including the self-hatred thing that we’re focusing on since that’s what the poem focuses on.
Cornelis Vreeswijk, as you may know since I’ve written about that a few times earlier when writing about him in more detail, also struggled with similar emotional issues. He had terrible problems with intimacy and closeness and often wrote about it and generally his love life difficulties, and had relationships with many women in his life, but whenever things started to get deeper, it scared him, or something else made the relationship impossible to be stable for longer and things were constantly stormy and messy from what you can observe when having a closer look at his life. He was always very shy though it may be hard to believe just when hearing him live a few times, I had a problem with that anyway because he is so eloquent and has a sort of jovial, kinda boisterous air about him. But when you observe things for longer, listen to many more live recordings, read some more and listen to some interviews like I did, it does show a lot, plus obviously it is there in his poems and lyrics. It often amazes me how he could mask it so well but from what I understand he saw his outside personality as some sort of a role he was supposed to play in life, or something. Must have been so freakishly exhausting, would surely be for me anyway haha. And of course there’s that whole self-loathing and self-destruction thing which is just so sad. I remember when watching the 2010 Amir Chamdin’s film “Cornelis” (which was a real struggle since I didn’t really have any audiodescription or anything and with my less than perfect Swedish skills didn’t always understand everything fully but still I think I understood a lot on that first watching, I did have English subtitles to help myself with though when need be but back then my Swedish was actually better than my English) that was what affected me the most when I saw the level of that self-destruction, perhaps because, while I am not an addict in the classical understanding of this word, I struggle with other self-destructive behaviours like self-harm and can deeply relate to what it’s like feeling awful about yourself, so I guess it must have struck a chord or something. So it seems quite natural that Cornelis would feel some affinity with Fröding as they shared so much, and I am actually a bit surprised that he didn’t interpret more of his poems because apparently a lot of Swedish singers did that.
He released his interpretation of it, with a very jazzy/bluesy feel on his 1970 album “Poem, Ballader Och Lite Blues” (Poems, Ballads And A Bit Of Blues). It’s not as musical as many other Frödings poems are, so probably for that reason, rather than an actual song, it’s more like sing-speak, which is something Vreeswijk used a lot in his music and I think it often makes it more expressive than just singing and is very characteristic of his style.
But a couple years ago, quite some time later after I acquainted myself with Cornelis’ discography, I came across his live performance of this song on YouTube, in collaboration with a 70’s jazzrock band Made In Sweden. I like the album version a lot and it’s not much different at all, despite the instrumentalists are different, but I slightly prefer the rocky live version rather than the jazzy album version as it just speaks to me more, so that is why I chose to share the live one with you.
For contrast, there is another artist from Sweden called Sofia Karlsson whom I absolutely love (I shared her cover of Vreeswijk’s Grimasch Om Morgonen in the very beginnings of this blog), who also interpreted this poem in 2009, but in such a starkly different way! While Cornelis’ version is so raw and jaggy, intense and frenzied, raving and just so very directly conveying the feeling of this poem, Sofia’s version, while no less expressive, is so much subtler, sophisticated and I’d say more from an outside observer’s point of view rather than sitting directly in the lyrical subject’s brain. For some people it might make it more emotionally bearable. 😀 I love both!
In Cornelis’ live version, he makes a brief introduction just like on the album and says that: “Gustav Fröding was a hip poet. He tried to drown his sorrows. But they could swim”. I think it’s such an interesting way to put it lol. Below is a poetic translation of this poem, so that you know what it’s all about. I took it from
It’s a pity though that most of you probably can’t understand the Swedish version and there are so many cool words that I’ve never heard anywhere else, my favourite is klumpkloss, which in the translation below is interpreted as “object of fright”, I’m not exactly sure how to translate it to English but I suppose it would be something like a lump. I find this word really funny but sadly never had an occasion to use it in a real life situation haha, I don’t even know if people actually use it. 😀
A month or so ago I shared with you this song in its original version, performed by Cornelis Vreeswijk, my previous musical crush whose poetry I would love to translate into Polish sometime in future, it is my very big dream. Also I’ve made an attempt to translate that song into English, which you can see here
. But today I wantd to share with you this song in another stunning performance. Anything by SOfia Karlsson is stunning, but since I love Vreeswijk’s music and poetry so much, this is my favourite song I’ve heard by her. Hope you’ll like it too, She’s so expressive.
My Inner MishMash 