Lost in translation? The Beatles on song

Some time ago, this column took a look at the mondegreen: the misheard lyric. Now meet its fellow phenomenon: the soramimi.

It is what kicks in every time you listen to Michelle by the Beatles, and the words Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble, a French translation of an earlier line “These are words that go together well”, sound to you like “Some days mom keeps on playing Fiona’s song”. Soramimi involves taking song lyrics of one language and creating sound-approximations of these in another language, invariably at the cost of sense. It is different from the mondegreen, which is a case of mishearing words in the same language.

In my schooldays I actually experienced both these auditory oddities simultaneously, whenever the school choir sang a hymn with the line “We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves” and it came across as “Vishwakarma Joy Singh, bringing in the cheese”. Much later, I would blissfully recast another non-English line from another Beatles song, Sun King: Quando para mucho mi amore de felice carathon. The line made (slightly) more sense as “Want to pair a moocher with a moray, if Alisha carries on”.

Online searches reveal that a number of languages, such as Danish, Dutch and German, have coined terms for lyrical mishearings in translation. But most people seem to use the Japanese term. Japanese comedians have for long been using soramimi-generated ideas as part of their performances. One of them, for example, has rendered I want to hold your hand by the Beatles as Aho na honyohan, meaning “idiotic public urination”. At least one Japanese researcher has used such examples of wordplay in a study of bi-lingual spoken word recognition.

Will the phenomenon work with Indian languages, do you think? Well, take this line from the chorus of a hit song by the Vapors: “I think I’m turning Japanese”. It sounds uncannily like the Hindi Theek hai, Tony, ja paani se... Even more extended bi-lingual engagements have proved even more fruitful. One Mike Sutton, under his username Buffalax on the web, has provided English subtitles to an entire Tamil song which begins Kalluri vaanil kayndhya nilaavo. The reworking of that line in English reads “My loony bun is fine Benny Lava”, and it gets even better, though not necessarily more intelligible, as the song progresses.

A little experimentation will suggest that, even for the world of Bengali music, the possibilities are quite an earful, and go beyond merely hearing Lata Mangeshkar’s Pa-ma-ga-re-sa as “Pa, my girl is sour”. People in Paschimbongo actually have another opportunity to share Tagore with the world; in the form of soramimic transcriptions of lines from his songs, perhaps to be played at traffic intersections while cars wait. There can be television shows on the theme; maybe even quiz programmes. (“Which song begins with a line whose homophonic English equivalent might be: ‘Hallo — um er, hallo? Oh, go, hallowed bovine borers’?”)

And as a tribute to our Bishwakobi, we could refashion the term soramimi into a Bengali soundalike: in fact, the poet’s eldest sister’s name — Saudamini.

(The writer, who teaches English at a city college, often wishes he could play music instead. He can be reached at kushal_biswas@hotmail.com)