Two songs were written by Georges Bressance, both of which deal with food, natural food, breast milk, but straight from the source… Both tell the story of a girl with the same name, Margot. And both are sung in Hebrew by Yossi Banai.
The first is named after him, Margot. The poem describes a situation that could have remained unnoticed, except that “a young man passed by and saw the play and called out to the whole audience in the middle of the day.” The repeated use of derivatives of the same root: “chest” and “playwright” is not accidental and is definitely linked to the chest. It is true that in the French poems, and also in the Hebrew, there are bolder descriptions of private parts, but this is what makes the story so special. When you start talking about it, it takes on an increasingly bolder meaning. And the young man who saw the play and ran to tell the guys is the one who exaggerated the story. In fact, it was not him, but also Georges Brasans, who exaggerated and ridiculed it.
So what was the story really about? A little girl breastfeeding without hiding. Simple, right? The interesting thing is who is she breastfeeding? Here is how Barsnes wrote (in Naomi Shemer's fluent translation): “When the beautiful-eyed Margo found a cat in the field / she, without thinking twice about it, waved all her dresses, and exposed her pair of breasts / and embraced her find to her heart… A young man passed by and saw the spectacle / and called out to the whole crowd, and in the middle of the day.”
Georges Bressan was a champion at taking small pictures and exaggerating them. That way he could show us all how ridiculous the state is, the police, the church, and also… us. And what's great is that he didn't write poems of rebuke, not poems of morality, but, as mentioned, he brought small pictures that he rhymed with rhymes that seem innocent until suddenly they bring a twist.
Here, for example, begins a completely surreal spectacle of what happens in the village following the event: “The teacher and the principal, both the officer and the butcher / neglected the public’s welfare because of this / and the mail train also disappeared / but no one read his letters anyway.” After Bressanone dresses up, about the school, the army, and the post office, all of which are actually representatives of the authorities, and with whom he likes to clash, he comes to his beloved, the police, the court, the prison, and the church: “Their singing stopped in the middle, may God forgive them / The children and the boys of the choir / There was a prison warden there in my life, which is not pleasant / And the policemen came to her in a panic.” Many, many of his poems hid, within the smile and pleasantness, a blatant criticism of the government, the state, the authorities, and everything that is institutionalized. So it is with the gorilla who actually rapes a judge, so it is with the navel of the wife of the head of the censorship branch, and so it is with the thief, the brat and all the others (and true Francophiles will forgive me for not citing the names and examples here in the original language).
Barsance brings Margot back in the song “I’m a Brat”
Let's move on to the second Margo for a moment. In Hebrew, the song is called “I am a rascal,” and it also describes a hearty meal enjoyed by a girl named Margo, except this time it is not a cat that is dining, but rather Barsance herself: “She looked at me trembling, she was shy / When I devoured the fruit of Paradise under her shirt” (translation by Dan Almagor).
So I turned to Dan Almagor and asked him about the frequent use of this name: “Margot (or ‘Fat Margot’) was the name of a Parisian prostitute, about whom the wild French poet (a real brat, who met his death by hanging) François Villon had already written the poem, which Alterman translated early in his career, as an agricultural student in France. The name Margot was familiar to every poetry lover. FrenchAnd it's no wonder that Bressanone also chose it more than once as a symbol of the sensual, erotic, daring woman.
Without me asking, Almagor also replied about the cat that appeared in the first poem quoted here: “At that time, Alterman wrote in Paris and sent Shlonsky a poem called “Autumn Urbani,” about a bar, “and opposite, a little swallow yearns / for a cat.” The cat was very beloved by my son. Paris"And in this city there is even a street called 'Fish Side Cat Street'."
Since the second poem is called “I am a brat,” I cannot move on to the agenda without saying something about the poet Almagor called “a brat” who wrote the long poem that Alterman translated: “François Villon lived in the Middle Ages, and was known as the most prominent ‘brat’ in French poetry. When he was in prison and knew that he was about to be hanged, he wrote a 4-line poem that no French poet or lyricist did not know by heart:
aborigine France I am a sufferer,
My city – Paris, where I am not at ease.
Now, hanging from a tree and a rope,
"My throat will bear the burden of the ass."
(Translated by Reuven Tzur)
By the way, the translations we sing are adapted to spoken Hebrew, some of the adaptations also stem from the fact that there are things that are quite difficult to play on Hebrew radio. On the other hand, on the playful website where these lines are currently being written, there is also room for these things, if only in the name of credibility. Because it is important to also show some of the lines that were shelved. In the song "I'm a Freak," for example, Dan Almagor translated: "She said, maybe stop, you have no shame / And stroked my head a little, yes, like any woman." But Reuven Weimer, who wrote an entire book of translations of the originals faithful to the original, translated the same verse this way: "She said in a stern voice, What happened to you? But in the end she gave it to me like any girl."
We will not go into detail here about the biography of Bresance, many have dealt with it, I will only say that he was known to me as a framebreaker (as already described above), but here, in my research about his two poems, I suddenly found a certificate of appreciation from an official and orderly institution (in an article by Ari Katorza in the culture section of Ynet). Impossible! A letter of appreciation from an official institution? To Bresance? Read it for yourself: “Dear Georges Bresance, we thank you for your beautiful poems that help us live.” You will probably ask who was the institution that spoiled Bresance’s march against the institutions, and well, here is what is written at the end of this certificate of appreciation: “On the signatory: The Paris Prostitutes’ Organization.”
That's it, in conclusion it should be mentioned that at the end of the song the cat is removed, and Margot is married off. The second Margot also gets married and Barsance describes it this way (translated by Dan Almagor):
When I lost Margo
My whole world is lost.
Because they immediately praised her.
To one beat
She already has three sons.
And a naughty baby
The ones who scream all day long
And ask for milk
God of lovers
May He forgive me and have mercy.
But I nursed her.
A long time before them
A little about crystal dust from the author of the post
Ofer Gavish is a singer researcher and hosts singing events and singer trips in Israel and Europe. More stories can be found On the Ofer Gavish website And you are also welcome to contact him atHis Facebook page.