Canh Thân is three years old!
I started this blog three years ago, and I’ve decided it is now high time I pay tribute to the musician Canh Thân. Canh Thân was a famous musician in the 1940s, and his stage name is based on his birth year according to the East Asian lunar calendar. The lunar calendar is organized into sixty-year cycles consisting of ten “heavenly stems” paired with twelve “earthly branches” (Viet. thiên can địa chi). The twelve “earthly branches” are associated with the more familiar twelve animals of the zodiac. The musician’s heavenly stem was canh, and his earthly branch is thân. It just so happens that my birth year shares the same stem and branch combination as Canh Thân’s, though I am obviously much, much younger. This blog is not named after the musician, but a shared name is reason enough to celebrate his music!
Canh Thân (real name unknown) was born in 1920 in Hải Phòng and began his musical career as a singer in northern Vietnam. Like many artists and intellectuals, he joined the struggle for independence during the Anti-French Resistance War (1945-1954, known in the West as the First Indochina War with the slightly different date range 1946-1954). But he eventually abandoned the resistance and was back in Hanoi by the early 1950s, working as a singer and penning some of his most famous songs. He migrated south in 1954 when the country was partitioned. In Saigon, he worked for the national radio station in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) and the army’s psychological warfare unit. For more on Canh Thân’s biography and oeuvre, see Nguyễn Trương Quý’s blogpost “Dư vị của phiêu lãng” and listen to this podcast interview with a singer who knew Canh Thân (both in Vietnamese).
To celebrate the third anniversary of my blog, I’ve chosen to translate Canh Thân’s “Come With Me to Distant Skies” (“Đi Với Tôi Đến Chốn Trời Xa”), probably composed in the 1950s. The song invites the listener to abandon their cares and travel with the singer to a paradise of music and dance. The song was popular at dance halls and has a distinctively Western sound compared to many Vietnamese songs written in the mid-20th century. Below is a recording of a performance by the singer Bách Yến. The footnotes on the translation are not linked because the software does not allow for it.
ĐI VỚI TÔI ĐẾN CHỐN TRỜI XA
Nhạc và lời của Canh Thân
Đi với tôi đến chân trời xa
Trăng nước êm một trời đầy hoa
Bạn của Hằng Nga và vô cùng thanh thú
Lắng tai nghe nhạc réo lững lờ
Đi với tôi đến chân trời xa
Bên suối mơ là nhà của ta
Tay đàn miệng ca và mơ màng ta múa
Gót chân theo nhịp bước thần tiên
Có ai đâu vui như tôi
Tuy không có dài hơi
Người nào chán và buồn tình đời
Đều cùng yêu tôi
Đi với tôi đến chân trời xa
Đâu có chi đẹp bằng đời ta
Mặc ngày dần qua
Nào vang lừng câu hát
Dắt tay nhau về chốn bồng lai
Anh em ta quanh năm ta vui, ta vui, ta vui luôn
Bên nhau ta ngồi trông nhau ta cười cười cười, cười dẹp mạch sầu tuôn
Đó đây, đó đây
Như là chim hót vang trời cao lướt mây kìa tung bay
Anh em ta quanh năm ta vui, ta vui, ta vui ca
Dưới những ánh đèn hàng ngàn màu sắc với những tiếng kèn òa òa òa
Đó là, đó là
Một cuộc đời đầy huy hoàng đầy nhạc và thơ xinh như mơ
COME WITH ME TO DISTANT SKIES
Words and lyrics by Canh Thân
Original translation by Nu-Anh Tran
Come with me to distant horizons,
The moon shining on calm waters, a sky filled with flowers,
We’ll be friends with Hằng Nga1 and incredibly mirthful.
Listen quietly as the music gently calls.
Come with me to distant horizons,
Our home by a dreamy brook,
Our hands strumming, our mouths singing, we’ll dance dreamily, Our steps in rhythm with the gods and immortals.2
Who could be as happy as me?
Even if I am not long of breath,
Anyone who’s bored and tired of life
Can’t help but love me.
Come with me to distant horizons,
What could be as beautiful as our life?
Though the days will pass by, let our song resound,
We’ll walk holding hands into paradise.
Brothers and sisters, we have fun, fun, fun all the year round,
Together, we’ll gaze at each other and smile, smile, smile – put away that sorrowful face –
Here and there, here and there,
Like birdsong echoing high in the sky, gliding over the tumbling clouds.
Brothers and sisters, we have fun, fun, fun and sing all the year round,
Beneath thousands of colored lights, while the horns go wah, wah, wah.
That is, that is
A splendid life full of music and poetry, sweet as a dream.
BEHIND THE TRANSLATION
Perhaps the greatest difficulty with this song is that I could not find period sheet music and had to rely on lyrics found scattered across the internet. Not only did these versions disagree with each other, they sometimes deviated from the recording as well! The song is widely known under the title, “Come With Me to Distant Skies” (“Đi Với Tôi Đến Chốn Trời Xa”), but in the signature line of the song, I think Bách Yến is actually singing chân trời xa (literally, “distant horizon”), not chốn trời xa (literally, “the location of the distant sky”). I have tried to remain true to the original title and what I hear on the recording, but that means that the song title diverges from the signature line. Also, most online lyrics render the last four words of the penultimate line as tiếng kêu òa òa òa (literally, “the sound wah wah wah”), but I swore I heard tiếng kèn òa òa òa (literally, “the horns go wah, wah, wah”) in the recording, so I have gone with the latter meaning. Here, I think òa òa òa is an onomatopoeic phrase referencing the sound of brass instruments.
It took me a long time to decide how to translate the second line of the third verse: “Even if I am not long of breath” (“Tuy không có dài hơi”). Who or what was long of breath, and what did that have to do with loving the narrator of the song? After poking around on the internet and thinking it over, I think the narrator is a singer promising listeners that s/he will be able to cheer up even the most apathetic, depressed audience. The singer modestly acknowledges that s/he may not be “long of breath,” meaning able to sing long musical phrases without taking a breath, but avers that such a technical weakness is no obstacle when it comes to the magic of music.
I translated the second line of the last verse as, “Beneath thousands of colored lights…” (“Dưới những ánh đèn hàng ngàn màu sắc”). The original Vietnamese could be literally translated as, “Beneath lights that are thousands of colors,” but I found that to be a bit of a mouthful and therefore transposed the words to achieve a more elegant translation.
TECHNICAL STUFF
I relied on the lyrics found at VN Guitar and Nhac.VN, with minor revisions based on the recording and other versions of the lyrics scattered across the internet.
Recording & image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItavooS2uGc
NOTES
1 Hằng Nga: The third line of the stanza references Hằng Nga (Ch. Chang’e), a mythical figure in Vietnamese and Chinese culture. She is typically depicted as a beautiful young woman who lives on the moon, and her name has become a poetic way of referring to the moon, similar to the goddess Selene and Artemis in Greek mythology and Diana in Roman mythology. For more on Hằng Nga, see my post on the “Parade of Lanterns in the Eighth Month” by Đức Quỳnh.
2 thần tiên (“gods and immortals”): Two types of supernatural entities in Vietnamese and Chinese mythology. Thần (“gods”) are said to have magical powers and may live anywhere, and tiên, typically translated as “immortals” or “celestial beings,” live forever in the heavens. The phrase thân tiên describes a condition that is as blissful as paradise.