Croatian world heritage

When we were kids trying to catch some sleep on a Saturday night, we had parents who would gather around their bottles of Chianti in a straw clad fiasco bottle that had to be finished and turned into lamp stands. They would also play music matching the following criteria, of which this year’s Croatian entry is a fine example:

  • It should originate from a country east of Hamburg
  • The melody should be sad, sentimental and serious
  • The singing should be quite polyphonic
  • The lyrics should be in a totally incomprehensible language
  • It should evolve more and more during the song until it explodes in an intensely dramatic finale after which there finally is silence and their children are relieved and fall to sleep.

So far, no good at all. But fear not if you are an idealist Croatian with high hopes for your country to reach far beyond the beaches of Pula. We are quite positive.

This is in fact a decent group of tenors bursting with integrity and for that we salute them and welcome their Christmas in Vienna record next year. Croatia are staying true to their heritage without being overstated or parodic and without as much as a reminder of lederhosen, bagpipes or Gypsy costumes. Well done. The singers will be hearty welcomed as we cannot imagine them singing a single tone out of key and those suits are looking seriously sharp.

Don’t do the mistake we did and translate the lyrics into English, though. We mean “I have no gold. To adorn your lovely form”??? What was going on there? We’ll just spare you for the rest and lock up all translators within reach of Malmö Arena. After all, singing in your own language should always be rewarded, especially when you have nothing to say.

Fun fact of this entry is that the way of singing, klapa singing, is on the world heritage list of Unesco. Now, we wouldn’t mind if these guys end up there too. See y’all in Malmö.

5 comments

  1. Hello there ..I just wanna say you couple of things as comment on this :First of all this english version is not good as it supposed to be but the main problem is that Mižerija is song on dalmatian dialect which is hard to translate on english and by translating song looses the power it has on croatian …..maybe the problem is `cause it was written by professors of english and not author of Mižerija himself(honestly don`t know why they did that I think Goran himself could make it ) …..what I try to say is that song looses it`s meaning when it`s translated and it hard for you from Europe to understand it on croatian unless you know the langauge …that`s why people have reactions like what? what this means? on things like “I have no gold. To adorn your lovely form” ..in croatian version this lines mean that guy has no gold to give it to his lovedone but he has hands to give her a hug,faith and true love to give it to her and the point of lines is that she supossed to appriciate things like that not expensive stuff like money,gold,etc.
    and secondly:about outfit-no guys won`t have this suits on them ..they will wear some parts of clothes which is used in traditional almost 300 years old game called Alka ..that clothes is quite expensive and as far as I know that will be the most expensive clothes ever on Eurovision `cause that vests they will wear cost 15 000 each and there are 6 of them so count how much money is that 🙂

    1. Thanks for sharing your insight! Unlike most ESC fans we really like this song, and we think it will do much better with both the average voter (outside the crazy ESC fanbase) as well as with the juries. Most definitely Grand Final potential. Can’t wait to see those costumes!

  2. I appreciate tradition and I’m sure Klapa has a lot of very interesting examples. Unfortunately, I find this one just as dull as the untraditional Finnish bride’s song.

Leave a Reply to goodeveningeurope Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.