ichliebekira

When my dad died in November 2010 we sent the funeral home some photos for them to make a memorial video for the wake. It was only last weekend that I discovered that all of the music they added came from Secret Garden's debut CD, "Songs from a Secret Garden". One of these songs, "Serenade to Spring", was originally done as a vocal tune called "Danse mot vår"

As a solo musician, my goal is to expose the North American public to a wide variety of music from all over the world, in their original languages whenever possible, and I'd like to add "Danse mot vår" to my vocal repertoire. Simplified to their structural essence, the Norwegian lyrics go like this:

Gjennom regnbuens glans

Ser jeg himmel og hav

Smelte sammen i soloppgang.

Og mens tankene flyr

Vákner sanser til liv

Og jorden nynner sin egen sang.

Jeg vil danse mot vår

Kjenne hud møte hud,

være ung i et nyfødt år.

Kjenne liv i min kropp

Fra en sol som står opp

Være ung--jeg vil danse mot vår!

I en blomstrende eng

Vil jeg vandre avsted

Og la sansene finne vei

Jeg har vårkjolen på

Vinden stryker meg nå

Jeg byr deg en vals, kom og dans’ med meg

I recently saw a YouTube video of Elisabeth Andreasson performing the song, which included a subtitled translation of the lyrics. I don't know if the funeral home knew about the lyrics, but I see them collectively as a beautiful metaphor for the transition from one form of life to the next--i.e. the body may die, but the soul is eternal. So I think this would be a great addition to my vocal repertoire: not only would it add to my multilingual repertoire, but it would be, in a way, honoring my dad as well.

However, there's one snag, and it arises from the "vårkjolen" (spring-dress) reference. This reference, along with the lyrics as a whole, lead me to speculate that the primary character/narrator in the song might be a personification of Mother Nature, and so I'm not going to be comfortable doing the song if it turns out it can only be done from a feminine perspective (for example, I cringe every time I hear Kate Bush doing Elton John's "Rocket Man", particularly the "miss my wife" line).

So my question basically is: Does the "vårkjolen" line need to be adapted for a masculine perspective (and if so, how), or can the "kjolen" element of the word be understood to mean "dress" in the sense of clothing in general?

I have an old 200 MB laptop hard drive that I'm trying to connect to any of my more recent computers via a USB adapter. Ultimately what I'm trying to do is set up a Windows XP laptop to boot up in DOS mode so that I can run on it a professional PCMCIA MIDI card whose manufacturer stopped writing driver software for it after Windows 95, and the old hard drive has all the files I need for that.

As far as I can tell the hard drive adapter itself works fine, because the hard drive powers up, but none of my computers, which between them run Windows Me, Windows XP and Windows Vista, will read the drive or even recognize that it's there, even if I plunk in the driver software for the adapter when running from Windows Me. What might be happening here? Is the hard drive too old, or is there a BIOS or file system (i.e. FAT/FAT32/NTFS) incompatibility issue? The old hard drive originally came from a Toshiba T1950 running MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1.

(BTW, the solution isn't as simple as "plug the hard drive back into the T1950 and access it from there"--the T1900 series laptops have apparently become notorious for a problem in the power circuit, with the result that users have to press the power button literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times before the laptop will finally kick in. There's a possible repair for the power circuit problem--see, for example, http://www.electronics.dit.ie/staff/bredmond/tosh4... --but this is too advanced, let alone time-consuming, for me to try myself, and I'd rather be making music than soldering circuit boards.)

Also, what I'm thinking of doing is ordering an IDE adapter so that I can try plugging the drive directly into my Win Me computer's disk drive system. Are there any foreseeable problems along this line?

I've been searching all over the net for the lyrics to a ballata by the 14th-century Italian composer Francesco Landini, "Lasso! di donna vana inamorato", and haven't been able to find them. I get the impression they're the sort of thing you wouldn't normally find on the net. I found a MIDI file supposedly containing the lyrics, but the lyrics there are only fragmentary and don't contain hyphenation or even word spacing. Does anyone have the sheet music from which they could copy the lyrics here?

Im DVD „Regy Clasen Live im Schmidt Theater“ gibt’s ein Extra, „So nah“, in dem Regys Gitarrist, Christian Gauger, ein Hemd mit einem roten Firmenzeichen trägt (ab 3:11). Weiß jemand, was dieses Firmenzeichen bedeutet?

I have an IBM ThinkPad 600 laptop whose CMOS battery appears to be dying (errors 163, 173, and now sometimes 192). Once I've reset the time in the BIOS and then turn my laptop off and on again, the machine boots up fine. But how long I will be able to continue to do this before the laptop dies entirely? I know the easiest solution would be to buy and install a new CMOS battery--I'm looking at a few such batteries on eBay at the moment--but I'm not sure if the installation process is something I should do myself or not.

The reason I want to try to prolong the laptop's useful life on its current CMOS battery is that I want to replace my slightly newer desktop computer with a brand-new one, at which point the existing desktop would "replace" the ThinkPad for the time being until I buy a new laptop (I bought the ThinkPad second-hand). But I'm not always in the position of being able to afford new computers on the fly like that, and I'd rather buy new now than used or refurbished.

I'm working on an English-language biography of the German singer Kira and I've come across an article from "Die Welt" which quotes her as hating being compared with Nena (see http://www.super16.co.uk/groenpress/DieWelt150806.... for the complete article). I'm trying to translate the quote, and while I can parse most of it (I can speak German at a low intermediate level), I'm having trouble with the "da müssen scheinbar alle durch" part. My guess is Kira's saying that just about anyone in Germany could sing despite having dark hair.

Babelfish and other online translation utilities are useless here--Babelfish, for example, predictably translates "durch" as "through", and anyway I suspect the word is being used as a particle in this context. And while I know "durch" is sometimes used as a verb prefix, I've never seen it used that way in connection with "müssen", so I highly doubt that's the case here.

On my bilingual English-German web site, where I promote my services as a musician, I have an events section indicating where my gigs are taking place. Since some of those gigs are in Roman Catholic churches (weddings, funerals, memorial services and that sort of thing), I'm a little confused when it comes to translating the parish names. At first I used "Sankt Augustine", "Sankt Elizabeth" and so forth, but when I found out the word "sankt" (minus the capitalization) can also mean "sank" (especially when translated via Babelfish and other online translation utilities), I started substituting "Heilige" for "Sankt" on the advice of my dictionary. However, german.about.com's online glossaries, and my own browsing of German parishes' web sites, seem to insist that "Sankt" can be used, although I'm a little muddled about which of the two words is appropriate for what context. Also, can I sidestep the issue by using the abbreviation "St." whether I'm writing in English or German?

I'm using a MySpace account to promote my music and want to show my clients I can sing in German, but MySpace stipulates I have to own all the copyright to any audio that I upload. With that in mind, I'm working on a German version of a song I originally wrote in English in 2000. I'm trying to translate "But if we ever fight/We'll reconcile that night." (And not with Babelfish--it handles only prose.)

While I originally wrote, "Doch nach eine Streit so voll/Eine Versöhnung kommen soll," it doesn't quite work ("voll" especially doesn't work; I need a better-fitting adjective that rhymes with "soll"). I've tried other variations of the basic idea, but nothing I can think of seems to work.

Also, are there any good German rhyming dictionaries online? What word-order leeway do professional lyricists have when writing German lyrics?

Members of the german.about.com forums can get more details at http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messa...