Translation of Irish phrase?

[turbo-1]

This phrase is in "Prayer for Love" - a beautiful song by Mary Black on her "Babes in the Woods" CD. Does anybody here know what it means?

O Lyubvi malyu otchayanno

also this one:

V krayu dalyokum, chuzhie ne nuzhny.

[Gillianren]

I'm guessing those are phonetic spellings? I'm afraid I'd need the actual Gaelic to look it up. Especially since, when I pronounce them, they come out sounding Russian instead.

[Carnifex]

It's not Irish, it's Russian :eh:

"I pray about love relentlessly" and "Strangers are unneeded in the land far away"

Original spelling is

"О любви молюсь отчаено" (not sure about the last word) and "В краю далёкому чужие ненужны"

(EDIT: some stupid typos)

[turbo-1]

Thanks for your replies. Have you heard the song? It's breathtaking. I assumed it was Irish (Gaelic) because Mary Black is Irish and she sometimes sings about Irish themes. I have two of her CDs - "No Frontiers" and "Babes in the Woods". If they were vinyl albums, I would be on my 2nd or 3rd copy of each now, I play them so much.

I found out about her in a very neat way. I was driving around Boston years ago listening to a station with the tag-line "the mix is the music" that plays Rock, Blues, Folk, Country, etc, and I heard the most beautiful rendition of "I Say a Little Prayer for You", but the DJ did not give her name. I went to my local record shop and asked the guru if he knew of any new releases of that song. He did not, so I went on to describe the instrumentation and the arrangement, including a detail about there being a concertina in the mix. He said "I bet it's Mary Black" and put a note on his order sheet to get her latest CD. He was right on. Since I play music and played professionally for a number of years, I have a penchant for absorbing details like instrumentation, arrangement, etc while listening to music. That, and Bob's encyclopediac knowledge did the trick.

[Gillianren]

It's not Irish, it's Russian :eh:

Well, that does explain why it sounded Russian when I tried to pronounce it!

[turbo-1]

Pretty astute. I had a lady-friend in college (Cold War) who majored in Russian, so I should have picked up on the sonics. Sometimes things sound different when they're sung, though. I used to work with a Latvian survivor of WWII and found his language to be very interesting, with words that had either derived from or crept into other European languages. His last name was Berzins, which means "birches". He used to clue me in on regional jokes, including one that he thought was really funny when he was a kid: "Here come the Lithuanian boys clutching their piples." It sounded pretty childish, because it centered on a percieved tendency of Lithuanians to mispronounce B's as P's that changed the meaning from "bibles" to something a bit less delicate.

The story behind the story: The Russians swept through Latvia as they attacked Germany, and in the process they stripped Kredo's family's farm of all grain, vegetables and livestock, even killing his pony for food, and killing his older brothers, father and uncles when they tried to defend themselves. His mother and aunt ran to the school in town, got him and ran across country looking for sanctuary. They went south, then west, then north, and after a year they ended up in Belgium, from which they were shipped to the US. They tried to gather wild food and glean farmed fields along the way. Kredo was a little kid at the time and he told me that some days there was only a half-rotted potato or turnip to eat or an overlooked carrot and that his mother and aunt "weren't hungry" on such days, so he ate them. Believe me, his mother and aunt were cherished. War is heartbreaking. We sometimes hear little snippets like this that point out the nobility and self-sacrifice of the victims of wars, but this stuff never makes the evening news. Why?

[LurchGS]

A friend of mine (teaching me to paint) is married to a lady who is quite good with a harp (she has several that were custom made for her), and better than passible on the dulcimer... She occasionally plays while we drive ourselves nuts trying to get the eyes on 15mm figurines just right. It's quite pleasant..the music, not the 2-hair paintbrushes.

Anyway, while the music style isn't high on my list of preferences, live renditions are cool.

Too bad she has a voice like a seagull

(I hope she doesn't read this- she'd pound me to a pulp. Her voice isn't THAT bad, but not something you'd want to accompany a harp)