Concordância

I am becoming increasingly obsessed with Deolinda. There’s just something intoxicating about understanding a song in another language. I cottoned on to one called “Concordância“, which seems to be about grammar. Intrigued, I went looking for a translation but there wasn’t one. So I sat down and I wrote one. As it turns out, it’s quite witty. She starts with “I am a pronoun, a personal pronoun” and goes on to state what she wants from this man who is trying to subsume her into a nós. She demands “complementos diretos” which are both direct objects and also have the double meaning of complements that we use in english. “Nome” also means both “noun” and “name” and of course adjectives change depending on the noun, so you can see there’s stuff going on here that probably has more resonance if you’ve been taught Portuguese grammar at a Portuguese school.

There’s a website called lyricstranslate where people can post lyrics and others can translate them so I submitted one for Concordância and you can read it here if you’re so inclined.