"The Sound of Silence" was used as the theme song of the American movie "The Graduate" in 1967. It is the famous work of the folk song duo Paul Simon and Garfunkel in the 1960s.
What this song wants to express is:
The melody of "The Sound of Silence" is slow and low, and the lyrics are full of a hallucinatory artistic conception. Listening carefully, it seems to be telling a kind of catharsis of youthful helplessness. In front of me, I seem to see an ignorant girl walking alone in a narrow, cold alley paved with cobblestones. The noisy crowd gradually fades away behind her, and there is an endless night in front of me... If the song is a folk ballad, The words seem too profound. If the rhythm that oscillates with the powerful music is rock, it is too delicate. Musically, it creates a neutral body of the genre, which should be an important reason for its success.
The song itself is a wonderful poem with a rigorous structure. It is really difficult to take into account all aspects of form, pronunciation and meaning when translating, so I had to leave out the rhyme part and try my best to convert the words. In the process, the form and meaning (content and structure) of the original poem are retained, and it will be translated again when the translation skills are improved in the future. Let’s take a look at the meaning of this song and explore its deeper meaning step by step.
This song*** is divided into five sections, and the sections are interlocking and completed in one go. The speaker in the first paragraph comes to talk to Darkness, an old friend, and talks to Darkness as an old friend. This shows that he has always been lonely, and this is not the first time that he talks alone or meditates in the darkness. . What I want to tell my dark friend this time is a vision that lingers in my mind. Vision is translated as phantom because it often appears in the narrator's dreams. Although it is so illusory, it is so real.
The second paragraph tells the reality of the phantom. In the dream, the narrator is always uneasy and walks alone on the cobblestone street. Judging from the two sentences Neath the halo of a street lamp and I turned my collar to the cold and damp, it must be a wet and damp person. Cold night. On such a lonely and cold night, he was awakened by the sudden neon light and experienced true "silence". "Light" originally had positive meanings such as civilization, hope, and enlightenment. Here, Paul Simon reversed this image.
The third paragraph enters the climax in the phantom. Naked means naked, naked sight means naked eyes, and naked light means light emitted without a lampshade. It is very strong because it is direct. Under such strong light, he saw thousands of people. These people are talking, but the content of the conversation is empty and has nothing to say, so it is talking without speaking; the person receiving the words listens with the left ear and the right ear, and is absent-minded, so it is hearing without listening. Being able to skillfully juxtapose common simple words like talk, speak, hear, and listen to achieve artistic effects is truly a master in the folk ballad world. In addition to their empty words and absent-mindedness, some of these people even write songs and sing them, but they sing them insincerely and without emotion. They do'nt mean the words they're singing. Writing songs is one thing, singing them is another matter. People's voices cannot share the same sound as the songs written by oneself. Despite this, no one dared to face this problem squarely or disturb such silence.
Therefore, the narrator is anxious and angrily warns them about the horror of "silence", because silence is like cancer that will continue to spread until it devours everyone.
He wanted everyone to listen carefully to what he said so that he could help them, but no one paid attention to him. His words were like silent raindrops falling on the bottom of a silent well, causing no ripples.
In this way, everyone remains the same, worshiping and praying to the Neon God they have created. The neon god here is related to the neon light in the second paragraph, and the meaning of the sign is ready to emerge. It is not until the subway walls in the fifth line of this paragraph and the tenement halls in the sixth line that the real meaning finally emerges. Subway walls are often home to hobos, and tenements are, at best, better than ghettos. Neon lights contrast with it, forming a strong contrast. It represents the civilization of capitalism and its decadent material enjoyment. In the second paragraph, Paul Simon uses a metaphor to reverse the positive meaning of light and turn it into a dazzling abyss, because the neon lights make people unable to see the direction clearly. Because people are greedy for material enjoyment and ignore the things around them that they should care about, therefore, the neon god is a symbol of money worship. Just as the narrator was trying in vain to bring order to the chaos, a neon sign flashed a warning, which read: "The words of the prophet are written on the walls of the subway and in the halls of the apartments." Prophets are not figures mentioned in religion who can predict the future, but vagrants and poor people. They often write their inner complaints and dissatisfaction on the walls of the subway and the halls of their apartments. However, these voices are drowned in this materialistic society.
Lyrics:
Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone,
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one deared
Disturb the sound of silence.
"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you ,
Take my arms that I might reach you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the said signs, The words of the prophets
are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whisper'd in the sounds of
silence.
Darkness, old friend, here I come
I want to talk to you again
Suddenly there is an illusion coming quietly
The seeds were sown while I was sleeping
Those hallucinations that kept growing in my mind
Still lingering in the sound of loneliness
In the never-ending dream
I walk alone
on a narrow road full of boulders
Walking under the halo of street lamps
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I felt a little cold and damp
So I turned up my collar
The neon light that stung my eyes
was scratched Night
Touched the note of loneliness
Under the unobstructed light
I saw thousands of people
Maybe More
People are talking silently
People are listening silently
They write songs one after another
But there is no one People go and sing
No one dares
To disturb the light dreams of loneliness and sleep
I said: You fools
Could it be that Don’t you know that lonely cancer cells are spreading
Remember what I teach you
Hold the arm I extended to you
It’s a pity that my words are just like The raindrops fell silently
Echoing in the deep well of silence
Looking at people bowing their heads to pray to the sacred neon lights
But the neon billboards were A flash of irony
Issues this warning:
"The sages' prophecies are written on the walls under the tunnels
In the houses of the poor " inside"
Still murmuring in the silence of prayer