L’œuf et le cancan. Effets conjugués du texte et de la musique dans « La Cane de Jeanne » et dans ses traductions en espagnol et en italien

Abstract

This article is a case study about the signifying of the prosody in a song. We aim to observe how the interaction between text and music in “La Cane de Jeanne” of Georges Brassens produces a specific discourse about grief, and how Pierre Pascal and Beppe Chierici translate it into Spanish and Italian. The translators have to fit the lyrics to the pre-existing music, which involves lexical changes. The comparative analysis shows that they take advantage of the resources of the target language according to their own sensibility to transpose the original prosody. The association of text and music is a both formal and semantic constraint.