It is the August full moon tonight, a special occasion here. I am just back from the front with ringing ears where there was the big(ish) full moon party with a very loud and rather incongruous Greek heavy rock band. The last number ended abruptly when the electricity blew and we all trooped off into a quiet, beautiful and, of course, moonlight night.
The radio plays songs about the moon all day. Here are two, in a different vein to the music I have just been blasted with, one melancholy:
The words in translation (and another version) here
And one lively:
Words and translation here
1 comment:
The Greeks are lucky to have lovely multi-syllable words like fengari and pan- and nia-sailenos (or however you romanise them) to rhyme with - there is so little we can do with the slightly silly sounding one-syllable 'moon' in English...
Same also seems to apply to the Japanese - even the most brutal samurai warlords spent frequent evenings moon-viewing and prided themselves on being able to construct an elegiac waka or haiku about its transitory beauty at the drop of a kabuto.
(the Japanese for moon is tsuki - and as almost every other word in Japanese also ends with a vowel finding rhymes is extraordinarily easy)
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