This—barely—doesn’t quite qualify as a Cafe Society question. I think.
Anyway, in Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, towards the end of the film, Mina ends up shouting a mysterious phrase that my closed captioning transcribes as “Vint adu-mi un dor de duca!” Searching for pieces of that sentence online leads me to believe it’s Romanian, but I don’t know what it means. (The best web translator I found only translated the words “longing” and “an.” And that’s assuming the CC guys years back spelled everything correctly.)
So, for all I know, she could be screaming “John has a long mustache.”
Can anyone help me out with this? I could probably manage to get a sound clip of the line, to boot, if need be.
“Dor de duca” seems to be “wanderlust” (lit. desire of travelling) as well as the name of a Romanian folksong. I think “adu” is the 2s. imperative for “bring” (from “aduce”). Vint is apparently a dialect form of wind, or so sez the internet. Something like: [vint], bring me a desire to travel," perhaps more loosely “the wind brings on my wanderlust.” But a real Romanian speaker would be most welcome to correct me!
I spoke to my Romanian colleague about this, and he said that it was “difficult to translate into English,” but that “the wind brings on my wanderlust” is as close as we’re likely to get.
My husband (who is Romanian) says this is almost impossible to translate and have it make sense. He says the closest he can get is “wind, give me the desire to go” but not necessarily travel - he thinks it would be closer to a desire to go adventuring, or to get control of the path of one’s life.
It is supposed to be very poetic and full of imagery.
Interesting—by the way, thanks to you and HeyHomie!—in the context of the scene, I think it was some kind of a spell. Does that help it make any more sense?
I would have suspected that it was “For the Dead Travel Fast”, a line used in Stoker’s book, and which is suggested by the translations here. Unfortunately, that’s not how the line translates into Romanian, as it says here:
Nothing else on that site seems to equate to the phonetic given in the OP.
What’s the context? The fact that “dor de Duca” shows up a traditional Romanian folksong makes me suspect she;s saying something like “They’re playing the Dor de Duca” or “Play the Dor de Duca”, possibly Mina “channelling” Dracula (as she does in the book) and telling what he hears. I can’t get any of the on-line translators to tell me what this means, and I suspect the captioning is misspelled.