Azzo Rezori: One song and two Canadas

One of the first songs I ever learned to sing as a child was a German folk tune about little Hans heading out into the big wide world.

According to the song, all Hans needs is cheerful determination, a hat and walking stick, and the world is his to explore.

That's how I still feel every time I go to the internet. One click, like the closing of the front door behind you, and there's no predicting where you might end up and for how long you might be gone.

For hours often; sometimes for days.

I can't remember how it started the other day, but I clicked and found myself listening to the song If You Go Away.

I heard Frank Sinatra sing it, Barbra Streisand, Dusty Springfield, Greta Keller, Patricia Kaas, Shirley Bassey et al., and they all sounded pretty much the same.

All of them took the approach that the song with its heart-breaking story needs to be crooned, especially in those parts where the lover makes melodically soaring appeals to the beloved to give him one more chance.

One click led to another, and I discovered that the original version of the song was written and performed in 1958 by the Belgian singer-songwriter Jacques Brel.

The two versions are so different, and their differences carry so much cultural baggage, I was reminded of the great anglo/franco split in Canadian culture with its lasting presence of two separate souls and all the stereotypes that come with them.

Even the titles are different. Brel named his song Ne Me Quitte Pas, which translates as "Don't Leave Me."

The American poet-singer-songwriter Rod McKuen, who penned the English version, couldn't resist turning the bleak "don't" into a more hopeful "if."

It seems that francophone pop culture has always been more comfortable with embracing and caressing the bleak and harsh in the human condition than its anglophone counterpart.

Brel's version talks about misunderstandings, lost time and the destructiveness of the question 'why' when it's asked the wrong way, while McKuen's translation paints a world of once sunny skies, hearts high with love, young days, and long nights.

Brel speaks of hope for even extinct volcanos and scorched fields, so why not for faded love; McKuen of giving his lover a day like no day has been and will be again if she stays.

Brel offers to settle for no more than just staying around as the shadow of his lover's dog, while McKuen keeps harping on how empty the world will be and how there will be nothing left in it to trust.

It's the same end-of-love story seen through entirely different eyes.

This difference has lived on in the way the two songs have been performed over the years. The standard French version trembles with resignation and despair, despite all its searching for hope. The standard English version is a sentimental celebration of love despite all the evidence of hopelessness.

There have been a few performances that break the mold, but they've been few and far between.

Canadian singer-songwriter Terry Jacks got as close as anybody to singing the English version as if it was the French one. British singer Marc Almond added a new level of anxiety to his English version which makes it stand out as well.

On the French side, Juliette Gréco turned the whole story upside down by performing it with the anger of the lover who says, "You can't leave."Recently there have been artists like Brazil's Maria Gadú, Spain's Concha Buika, and Canada's Kellylee Evans who've given the French version new rhythm and energy.

There's no record of Leonard Cohen ever performing either of the two versions, but in a way he's been singing the French one all his life. His English-language songs are haunted by the same dark, uncompromising, and poetic beauty that made Ne Me Quitte Pas such an international hit.

But here in Canada the two most prominent cross-overs are Leonard Cohen and Celine Dion, both from Quebec. I listened to Dion's rendition of the French version and felt I'd just heard a nightingale sing, but nothing more. And I thought, yes, that's one way to cross over, Las Vegas-style.

For those who think like lovers undone, [and] the French and English souls of Canada are destined to separate, the French version of the song does offer hope with the following prayer:

And when the evening comes
The red and the black
Don't they embrace?

And little Hans?

He's gone for seven years and grows into such a fine man not even his sister recognizes him when he finally returns home.

His mother knows him right away, as a mother would. But does he stay?

The song doesn't say.