Apolinary POlek Sings Pani Zimy
When last sighted at 1heckofaguy.com, Apolinary POlek was providing Heck Of A Guy readers with information about the Warsaw Leonard Cohen Presents Anjani concert.1 Today, Apolinary returns as a performer himself.
Apolinary POlek, Leonard Cohen, and Pani Zimy
In our exchange of emails about the Warsaw Concert, Apolinary shared the MP3 file of Pani Zimy, his cover, in Polish, of Leonard Cohen’s Winter Lady. Impressed by what I heard, I asked to post it here.
Apolinary sings with voice that evokes Gordon Lightfoot,2 but his literary and musical sensibilities, as revealed by his email and information about him on various internet sites, resonate with the thematic perspectives that permeate Cohen’s early songs.
At the risk of declaring the obvious,3 I will note for the record that Apolinary POlek is an especially knowledgeable,4 and dedicated member of the hard core Cohen cadre. His admiration of Cohen’s work shines through in his cover of Winter Lady.
Winter Lady
Winter Lady was a track on Cohen’s first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, which was technically released on 27 December 1967 but did not receive significant distribution until 1968.
Although usually grouped among the “lesser known” Cohen songs, Winter Lady has spawned two particularly memorable covers, the 1994 version by Palace Songs and the rendition by Martha Wainwright and Kate & Anna McGarrigle on the soundtrack of Lian Lunson’s documentary-tribute movie, I’m Your Man. It was also one of the three songs, along with The Stranger Song and Sisters of Mercy, that Robert Altman used in his 1971 film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller.
As sung by Leonard Cohen, Winter Lady sounds much like a traditional folk ballad, a format at the peak of its popularity in the late 1960s, but the lyrics do not focus on that genre’s archetypal story of love lost as much as on the feelings and values of two individuals whose lives came together for a time.
Pani Zimy
No translation is exact, and, in any case, the goal of Pani Zimy was not the creation of a transliteration. At my request, Apolinary has provided a back-translation of the lyrics, which is printed below. The original lyrics can be found at Winter Lady lyrics by Leonard Cohen.
Winter Lady
Based on a translation by Apolinary POlek
Mistress of Trails, stay awhile,
Stay, you’ll leave in the morning.
I’m just the station on your way
And I know, I’m not your lover.
I brought the Child of Snow up
When I was on the warpath
And I fought every man for her
Until nights grew colder.
Her hair looked as yours,
She let them loose when she was sleeping.
And then she’d weave it on a loom
of smoke and gold and breathing.
Why are you so quiet,
Standing there in my doorway?
You chose your track long before
You came upon this road.
The Music
Click to hear Pani Zimy by Apolinary POlek
Credit Due Department:
Photo by Grabi
Footnotes
- Anjani Interview and Concert Online Today is the first of six Heck Of A Guy posts that covered the Warsaw Concert and Interview, which took place 31 March 2007. That post also contains information about and links to the other pertinent blog entries. ~back~
- For you youngsters, Gordon Lightfoot is the singer-songwriter responsible for If You Could Read My Mind, Early Morning Rain, and The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald, among many others ~back~
- I fancy myself somewhat of an expert on declaration of the obvious, having made a decent living as a psychotherapist for many years doing just that. ~back~
- While I consider myself relatively well informed on the life and times of Cohen, Apolinary has more than once corrected, politely and apologetically, errors on my part. Composing my charmingly askew takes on matters CohenIic has become, in fact, a notably more difficult and tension-filled task because of my awareness that somewhere in Poland I have a dedicated fact checker. ~back~
