Se ramassent-elles à la pelle ? Not yet. But it's coming. I picked these two up on our morning walk yesterday out at the edge of the woods. They looked a lot prettier when they were wet with dew. Dry, not so much. Most leaves are still hanging on and many haven't started turning color yet. That will change over the next few weeks.
From what I understand, that line, les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle, in the famous song means that there are so many dead leaves on the ground that you'd need a shovel to gather them up. Not so poetic in English. So Johnny Mercer, when he re-wrote the song in English, changed the line to "The autumn leaves drift by my window" and moved it to the opening stanza. In fact, he changed a lot of things. Most of what remains of the original song, apart from the sentiment, is the lyric "the autumn leaves" and the melody.
I love this trivia about the song. I had no idea what happened when autumn leaves start to fall....
ReplyDeleteI love the drift-by-my-window line... much nicer than the French line. In my head, this song is always sung by Nat King Cole, and it's a favorite (my dad used to walk around the house, singing Nat King Cole songs, it seems, and my parents loved him, so I came to love him, too :) )
ReplyDeletemitch, I would have guessed, "they hit the ground."
ReplyDeletejudy, I like him, too.