The Ballad of Geordie
Elaborato in inglese sulla ballata e confronto tra il testo tradizionale di "Geordie" e quello della celebre canzone del cantautore genovese Fabrizio De Andrè (2 pagine formato doc)
Ballads are medieval folk songs that
tell stories. This kind of poetry representation began to appear
throughout Europe at the same time of the rise of courtly love ideals
among the nobility.
Ballads generally used simple language (the composer were unlettered), they were composed in two or four stanzas. The ballad, differently by other forms of poetry, contain a limited stock of images and descriptive adjectives (ex. milk white steed) so that the singer could easier memorise it. Another characteristic of medieval ballads is the refrain: a line or a group of lines which is repeated throughout the song. Probably, just for its simplicity, the ballad have gained a lot of success in our time too. The most famous of them is probably that one of a doomed to death called Geordie. The Ballad of Geordie is been object of many reprocessing, such the "Geordie" of the Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André.
Now, I'm going to compare the standard version with the modern one. Both of them are branched in seven four-lines stanzas. The first one is written in old Scottish English, in consequence there are many differences within the Italian translation, owing also to the different meanings De André wanted to suggest. For example we can find a different translation at the fourth verse of the refrain where De André writes that Geordie stole six dears of the king's royal lodge and sold them in want of some money; it seems that the Italian singer wants to justify the crime of the young Geordie that had had probably the necessity of stealing to support his family.
The word "ballad" comes from the late
Latin "ballare", so "ballad originally meant a danced
song. Today, all the ballads we have received are not on the original
form, in fact they were handed down orally for a long time from
generation to generation: janglers who learned the text of the ballad
often liked to change it and the tune too, therefore ballads exist in
many different versions. Ballads generally used simple language (the composer were unlettered), they were composed in two or four stanzas. The ballad, differently by other forms of poetry, contain a limited stock of images and descriptive adjectives (ex. milk white steed) so that the singer could easier memorise it. Another characteristic of medieval ballads is the refrain: a line or a group of lines which is repeated throughout the song. Probably, just for its simplicity, the ballad have gained a lot of success in our time too. The most famous of them is probably that one of a doomed to death called Geordie. The Ballad of Geordie is been object of many reprocessing, such the "Geordie" of the Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André.
Now, I'm going to compare the standard version with the modern one. Both of them are branched in seven four-lines stanzas. The first one is written in old Scottish English, in consequence there are many differences within the Italian translation, owing also to the different meanings De André wanted to suggest. For example we can find a different translation at the fourth verse of the refrain where De André writes that Geordie stole six dears of the king's royal lodge and sold them in want of some money; it seems that the Italian singer wants to justify the crime of the young Geordie that had had probably the necessity of stealing to support his family.