I just stumbled across the song Txoria txori (“The Bird’s a Bird”) two days ago. It’s a classic, originally recorded in 1974 by the Basque folksinger Mikel Laboa, and there have been a gazillion covers of it since. (The American singer Joan Baez recorded one in 1998.) Despite that, it was totally new to me. I think it has to be one of the best ‘my baby left me’ songs ever. I thought I’d share.
Txoria txori, covered by John Kelly & Maite Itoiz, text and images by Markella Siaka
Basque lyrics:
Hegoak ebaki banizkio
nerea izango zen,
ez zuen aldegingo.
Bainan, honela
ez zen gehiago txoria izango
eta nik...
txoria nuen maite.
Spanish translation:
Si le hubiera cortado las alas
habría sido mío,
no habria escapado.
Pero así,
habría dejado de ser pájaro.
Y yo...
yo lo que amaba era un pájaro.
English translation:
If I had clipped its wings,
It would have been mine.
It wouldn’t have escaped.
But then,
It wouldn’t have been a bird anymore.
And I …
I loved the bird.
According to William Douglas, the story is that the Basque writer Joxean Artze was eating dinner with Mikel Laboa and his wife Marisol Bastida in 1968, and composed the short poem on a napkin. Marisol read it, and showed it to her husband, who took it home and did an arrangement. He later recorded it for the album Bat-Hiru (“One-Three”) released in 1974, a year before Franco died.
The song has no explicit political content, but because the song talks about freedom and self-determination and was recorded during the Franco regime in a minority language the Franco regime was actively trying to stamp out, it was understood as a protest song.
The song also goes by the name Hegoak (“wings”) from the first word of the song.
The title image is a photo of a European robin by Wikipedia user Jimfbleak. This bird is called a txantxangorri, “red chatty”, in Basque.
The Basque and Spanish lyrics are from Musikazblai. English translations are mostly pretty consistent. For the last line, a lot of English translations have something like “what I loved was bird”, which is a translation of the Spanish translation, apparently trying to capture a shift in emphasis in Basque. I think this comes across fine in English just from context. Some English translations refer to the bird as “she” or “he”, but the Basque text makes no indication of gender.