We’ve been hearing this wonderful song in a lot of stupid commercials in the past couple of years, completely missing the meaning. Here is a 1960 (studio?) performance by Edith Piaf (not the one where she was already ill and looked like a frail old lady, this must be earlier, she still has her voice and vigor). Why now? It showed up on my Youtube feed and I hadn’t seen it before. I wanted to share.
Completely with subtitles in French, English and (apparently) Arabic.
Thanks. I love that song and have a great digital version in my collection, but others may appreciate it. The only commercial I’ve seen it in is for Cadillac, but I don’t watch much TV. I believe the version in the Cadillac commercial is the real thing, but obviously much abbreviated for the 30-second commercial spot.
If I may go totally off topic for a moment, there’s an interesting linguistic point in the title. In a word-for-word literal translation, it reads “No, I don’t regret nothing”. In English this would of course be considered either incorrect or literally meaning the opposite of what it means in French. But in French grammar, it’s perfectly correct, and the two negatives are considered to reinforce each other rather than contradict each other. Thus proving, I suppose, that the logic of French grammar is no better than the mess we have in English!
Archaic English grammar (as recent as Chaucer, if I’m not mistaken) operated with a similar rule of negatives reinforcing one another.
Or so my high school English teacher would have me believe.
While the construction is considered incorrect (and lower class) in English, it does not mean the opposite. A double negative, despite what your grade school English teacher taught, is not a positive. Saying, “No, never” is never construed as an agreement. “I don’t regret nothing” means the same as “I don’t regret anything”; it’s just an uneducated way of saying it.
French always has two-word negatives, with “ne” before the verb and “rein” (nothing), “pas” (not), and “jamais” (never) after.
Je ne sais pas - i don’t know
Je ne sais rein – I know nothing.
Je ne sais jamais – I never know.
I believe Nina Simone does a nice arrangement of the song.
Isn’t this the song that Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) plays in the background while she is almost seducing Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), tied semi-naked to her bed, in the terrific baseball movie, Bull Durham. Robbins’ character, Sarandon’s season-long project, is a hunk from the neck down and otherwise dumb as a box of hair, and keeps referring to “that crazy Mexican singer.”
I see three negatives, so it’s actually a positive. Each one cancels out the previous one just like getting amnesia from a blow to the head.
The French troops who participated in the failed 1961 putsch in Algiers sang “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” as they were being trucked back to their barracks.
You have a lot to answer for, buddy.
I think of that line every time I hear the song, and think of Edith Piaf as that crazy Mexican.
It’s currently featured in a car commercial showing people forgetting that stuff is on the roof of their car…but I don’t think it’s Cadillac.
It’s a commercial for car insurance How does the song relates to saving money on insurance.? No one knows.
I remember first hearing the song with a Dove chocolate commercial. The commercial was like collection of snapshots of this woman’s life - from a small child to an old lady. Now seeing the translation it totally fit that commercial. (no regrets - indulge in chocolate as much as you want !)
The next was…for that car insurance commercial with people forgetting stuff on the roofs of their cars. Makes absolutely no sense.
Modern-day dialects of English, which we hear every day all around us–though they be non-standard–work the same as French, (and many other languages), where “double negatives” are still negative. From a linguistic point of view, they are no less valid.
There is nothing particularly unusual about this aspect of French, or the dialects of English that behave in the same way.
A linguistics professor is lecturing his class. “In English,” he says, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A student in the back of the room pipes up and says “Yeah, right.”
Just for that, I would give that student an “A” for the pragmatics section of the course.
It may be worth noting that this song–in the Piaf version heard in the recent insurance commercial–is the major theme of the 2010 Christopher Nolan move Inception. And the meaning of the song is very much a theme of the screenplay, which centers on guilt and regret.
Of course Nolan’s choice to use it in the movie may be just as much about the blaring trombones that introduce Piaf’s vocals, as about the lyrics:
The movie’s composer, Hans Zimmer, on the use of the 1960 version of the song:
Well, I hate the song. It’s so …self-insistant.
Dove chocolate commercial uses it too.