Une Enfant du Siècle lyrics

[ES3]

Good input from everyone, I've been replaying "La Candida" all day while studying. I got some of it by myself from taking Spanish in high school, but not too huge of a background in it. I'm not sure if it's officially "Candida" or "Cándida", because the latter suggests it might be associated with the English word "Candid", and if it is, then it could be any of a number of things: Outspoken, sincere, pure, etc.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/candid

[DrSmith]

Cándida is correct. Candida means nothing in Spanish without the accent. (But apparently it's some sort of fungus.)

Babelfish translates cándida to ‹ innocent ›; and alizee-reflections.net says it's ‹ naïve one ›.

[User22]

Yeah, there are so many different meaning to either Candida or Cándida that we just left it as the song name "Candida" in the song translation database....Man there are a bunch of meanings for it. I hadn't heard those before DrSmith and ES3, so thanks

[FanDeAliFee]

Allusion by "Eden, Eden" to "Eden Eden Eden"?

Originally Posted by Criss_pl

Considering my time spent with the songs and their lyrics, especially with the 4 last songs, I can absolutely assure you that there do is second Grand Central in lyrics, just focus
And by the way, do we have any interesting interpretations yet? The work seems to be done, so now for the interpretation part

I have reviewed the literal and free translations of Eden, Eden at Alizée Lyrical Reflections.

<table cellspacing="10"><tr valign="top"><td></td><td>I have no great insight into the significance of the storyline, but I must observe that there is a famous controversial French novel titled Eden Eden Eden by Pierre Guyotat, which appeared circa 1971.

Wikipedia writes:

This book was banned from being publicized or sold to under-18s. A petition of international support was signed (notably by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Boulez, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Dac, Jean Genet, Joseph Kessel, Maurice Blanchot, Max Ernst, Italo Calvino, Jacques Monod, Simone de Beauvoir, and Nathalie Sarraute). François Mitterrand, and Georges Pompidou tried to get the ban lifted but failed. Claude Simon (who won the Nobel Prize in 1985) resigned from the jury of the Prix Médicis after the prize wasn't awarded to Eden, Eden, Eden.

Amazon's product description of the book writes:

This, Pierre Guyotat's second novel, caused a huge scandal upon publication in France in 1970, and was later censored. Nowadays, he is regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of all time and his writing has been endorsed by Edmund White, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Extreme and obscene, Eden Eden Eden is set in a polluted zone of the Algerian desert during the civil war.

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A lay reviewer at Amazon writes:

This novel reads like some of Burroughs' earlier fictions--for example, The Soft Machine--but without the black humor that the American beat uses to leaven his nasty loaves. With Guyotat we are left with one continuous description of anal and oral rape, usually by soldiers on men and boys. There's no plot as we find in de Sade, no flights of vision or hyper-crazy odes to revolt as in Artaud to make it memorable--only the cubistic clinches of flesh and flesh--the terrible consequences of the weak in the clutches of the strong. This is not a pleasant read and I do not recommend it for the squeamish. I wonder what the author does to relax and have fun?

Another one elaborates:

The situation, however, seems to be this: a sort of camp town in the desert, a brothel of male prostitutes, and the soldiers... drillers... and assorted nomads and shepherds who wander in from the surrounding wastelands to use them. The text consists of a single uninterrupted paragraph of 181 pages describing in excruciatingly minute mechanical detail an unending series of copulatory acts without any seeming point but to emphasize the slime, stench, and excretions of living bodies.

What sort of inspiration is a book like this for a song - any song? The closest I have to a direct explanation are the remarks of yet another reviewer:

I might also suggest *singing* along with Guyotat because *Eden Eden Eden* has a uniquely intoxicating incantatory quality whose power is as much viscerally musical as it is appallingly visual.

<table cellspacing="10"><tr valign="top"><td></td><td>Perhaps we can better understand a link between the book and the song when we examine the career of the boss of The Factory, Andy Warhol. His films often highlighted gay and underground culture, like 1964's 35-minute-long Blow Job, one continuous shot of the face of DeVeren Bookwalter supposedly receiving oral sex from filmmaker Willard Maas - although the camera never tilts down to see this. (Aside: Note how use of a single shot parallels use of a single paragraph in the aforementioned novel.)

I suppose the general idea is that the story of Edie Sedgwick in New York is a tragedy leading to her suffering and premature death, one in which she is "brutally" used by Andy in a way analogous to the uses made of the brothel's workforce in the novel. Of course, the song Eden, Eden speaks about girls whose virginity lasts until their fourteenth summer, while the book Eden Eden Eden seems to feature boys whose orifices aren't left alone even for fourteen seconds, LOL. But the musical lyric about assaults on inhuman towns is an echo of novel's war-time town setting. The song also makes reference to a génie, which resonates with the cultural inheritance of Algeria, and an eternal summer, which suggests a place like North Africa.

Beyond that, I am at a loss to quickly discover significant touchpoints between the two works. Maybe Jean-René Etienne just thought referencing a hot novel would be good marketing, content relevance be damned? Hey, it worked for Mylène Farmer with Moi... Lolita, LOL!</td></tr></table>