Eppu Normaali - "Murheellisten laulujen maa" ("Land of Sad Songs") | Finnish song about abuse and alcoholism (edit: apparently a parody song?)
Eppu Normaali - "Murheellisten laulujen maa" ("Land of Sad Songs") | Finnish song about abuse and alcoholism (edit: apparently a parody song?)
I always wanted to write my own rhyming translation of this, but I never got any further than "Innocent in a sense / born by chance / in this icy, bitter, boreal expanse" before the quality started to drop off
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This isn't really a song about abuse and alcoholism, it's an ironic song poking fun of the cliches seen in many older popular Finnish songs.
I guess you need to be Finnish to get that it's a joke...
Yep, it's extremely culturally specific.
Is there anything you could say about those cultural nuances that get lost in translation?
I can try, at least. The first thing is that this song is over 40 years old and referencing a kind of Finnish music that was already passé by that time, so the joke is probably lost on most Finns these days. Many of the things referenced in this song are also stereotypical and old fashioned cliches about being Finnish: there's no way a song with these lyrics could've been taken at face value in 1982.
Also, whoever transcribed the lyrics screwed up this part
Ei mittaa järki eikä kärkimäärä
It's supposed to be "Kärki määrää" (Toivo Kärki was a Finnish singer and songwriter)
The lyrics did stand out to me as sort of stereotypical...
Well, it's said that the past is a foreign country, which means that 40 year old songs from another country will go through no fewer than two layers of cultural/linguistic telephone. A similar thing actually happened with the "oh my gah" bit in Azumanga Daioh, incidentally...
Kärki määrää
So is that some sort of wordplay that would lead to the lyrics being transcribed wrong, or was it just a screw-up with nothing else to it?
I'd say it's just a really common misheard lyric, I also thought it was "kärkimäärä" for years before finding out what the real lyric was (even though kärkimäärä isn't really a word that'd make any kind of sense in this or most other contexts).