What Did She Say?
I pulled my copy of the Chicago (film) soundtrack of the shelf yesterday and was belting out “Cell Block Tango” on my drive into work. I came to a dead stop when it got to Hunyak’s lines, which are in (I think) Hungarian.
Mit keresak, en itt? Azt mondjok hogy a hires lakem lefogta a ferjemet en meg leesaptam a fejet. De nem igaz, en artatlan vagyok. Nem tudom mert mondja Uncle Sam hogy en tettem. Probaltam a rendorsegen megmagyaranzi de nem ertettek meg…
Does anybody know where to find a translation? Surely I am not the first person to ask this question.
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March 23rd, 2004 at 5:20 pm
Googling it, I get this suggestion, from a review at amazon.com:
What am doing here?/ They say my famous lover held down my husband while I chopped off his head./ But it isn’t true, I am innocent./ I don’t know why Uncle Sam says I did it./ I tried to explain it at the police station but they didn’t understand me.
An almost-identical translation is offered here:
What I am doing here? They say, that the famous lakem [lover] kept down my husband and I stoke off his head. But this is not true, I am guiltless. I don’t know why Uncle Sam says that I did it. I tried to explain at the police station but they didn’t understand me…
August 17th, 2004 at 3:21 am
does this mean that her husbands head was chopped off, and who is the famous lover?
May 6th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
The supposition I come up with is this. I think the Hungarian woman Huyak has a gangster boyfriend. It is after all the 1920’s when Chicago was rife with bootleggers and other “family” type gangland organizations. So what if Huyak is innocent. Perhaps the gangster boyfriend killed her husband (chopped off his head), and she really doesn’t know anything about it.