Within the scope of this article, I shall not comment on all the lyrics in details, but draw attention to the strategies used by the translators, which resulted in two completely different versions. These observations sparked my curiosity to look more closely at what Francis Cabrel’s version has in common with Bob Dylan’s original song, and how Cabrel’s approach differs from Sarclo’s. He develops his analysis of this song in a second article about translations of Bob Dylan, declaring that “the adaptor breaks every pattern exhibited by the original” (FROELIGER, 2016, 52). It is arguably the best Dylan cover in French, not because of its ‘accuracy’ of replication, but because of the faithfulness of its transmission of greater meaning” (2007, 189). In his first article about covers of Bob Dylan in French, Nicolas Froeliger concludes his assessment with Cabrel’s song “S’abriter de l’orage”, stating that it is “a powerful and genuinely Dylanesque song. Sarclo eventually sang this song in French in 2012 under the title “Tout va bien” (2012) and later decided to translate more of Dylan’s works. His history of translating Dylan’s work began in 1979 when he translated the song “It’s Alright, Ma” (1965a) for Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine, who simply wanted to understand the lyrics. He began singing Dylan in English while he was studying in Lausanne and started performing professionally at the end of the 1970s. Sarclo is a Swiss performer who was also heavily influenced by Dylan from the onset of his career. He also released a live version on the album Sarclo Sings Dylan (in French), recorded on the occasion of the Performing Arts Festival in Avignon in July 2018 (SARCLO, 2018a). The second song of my corpus for this article is Sarclo’s first recording of “Shelter from the Storm” 2, released as a video on YouTube in 2017. He has since released a whole album of French versions of Dylan’s songs (CABREL, 2012). “S’abriter de l’orage” was his first attempt at covering Dylan in French. Francis Cabrel is a well-known artist in France, who started playing the guitar after he heard Bob Dylan play “Like a Rolling Stone” (1965b) when he was 13 and began his musical career in the mid-1970s.
Or lost in the storm free#
The first, Francis Cabrel’s “S’abriter de l’orage”, released in 2004 on the album Les beaux dégâts (2004b), is a free adaptation, as defined by Antoine Guillemain (“LeTradapteur,”), which means that Cabrel has translated the chorus and rewritten the rest of the song.
In this article, I shall compare the only two French versions of the song that have been released to this day. The song is characterized by a one-line chorus, repeated 10 times: “‘Come in’, she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’”.
It is one of his most famous songs from that period, having been performed 377 times on stage (“Still On The Road – Song Index S 1956-2016,” n.d.), most notably during his 19 tours (DYLAN, 1976 1979). Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm”, recorded in New York on 17 September 1974, was released in 1975 on the album Blood on the Tracks (1975b).
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