As long as I’m talking about prelapsarian pop music, I’d like to ask if anybody knows how the sixth line in Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” is punctuated. (I know that technically it’s Umberto Tozzi and Giancarlo Bigazzi’s “Gloria” as translated by Trevor Veitch, but give me a break.)
Because I can’t figure out whether it’s this:
Are the voices in your head calling “Gloria”?
Or this:
Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?
If the song were in Sanskrit we wouldn’t have this problem, since feminine nouns ending in “a” decline differently in the nominative and vocative cases.
And if wishes were horses, they would long ago have trampled the warlords who have usurped our government into oblivion.
The original Italian lyrics are useless, as they’re essentially about something completely different.
The lack of any pause in the music between “calling” and “Gloria” suggests that the former interpretation is correct. However, the millenia-long pause between “head” and “calling” suggests that correct prosody was not high on the translator’s list of priorities.
Any ideas?
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