teamsweeting

Herfra Hvor Vi Står

I spent Halloween 2010 in a Copenhagen University dorm building that is famous for throwing huge parties and has, like most places in Copenhagen, an impossible to pronounce name. I was in Copenhagen having the worst time of my life while ostensibly “studying abroad” but mostly just sulking around alone and chaining packs of House Of Prince cigarettes while trying not to spend any money. 

I was, to my own great surprise, invited to the party over the telephone by a girl I knew through my program who lived on one of the floors of the dorm reserved for international students, which meant she lived with a lot of engineering students from Sweden.

Because I am an American, I got there late. I had been told to dress as a clown as part of a series of team drinking games we were going to be playing but all of that had already started by the time I got there and the clowns, I would find out, were off somewhere in the bowels of the dorm racing a group of spys to the bottom of a bottle of cherry schnapps. I joined up with some Danes dressed as pirates and proceeded to get enthusiastically drunk to compensate for my lateness and lack of costume. After a series of elaborate drinking games that carried us from floor to floor, and usually involved me taking shots because I didn’t speak Danish, I was lead into a basement with long banquet tables and told it was dinner time. I forget most of dinner. I found the girl who had invited me and some other people from our program and I think we may have done a lot of chanting in Danish .

After dinner everyone stacked the tables in the corner without complaining and a band started up. For the next five or six hours the band played basically every single soul song I have ever heard. I stood right in front of the lead singer and held his tambourine between songs and was very drunk. Whenever the band went outside for cigarettes I followed them and said probably very stupid sounding things a Danish girl named Sigrid.

Sigrid tolerated this and at one point even introduced me to a few of the people in the band. One of whom may have been a member of Quadron. I am not sure. I do remember Sigrid introducing me to someone and asking if I had heard of Quadron and then I remember lying and saying that I had a Quadron album but couldn’t remember any of the names of their songs (has anyone ever fallen for this? Surely smart, sympathetic Danish girls never have).

Later, in a taxi, Sigrid pulled out her iPod and played the Quadron song Herfra Hvor Vi Står for me through her headphones and I stupidly slurred something about how Danish people sing very beautifully in English, even though the song is very much not in English. She didn’t say anything thank God.

Sometime after that, Herfra Hvor Vi Står became the most played song on my iTunes library and I became obsessed with figuring out what it was about. I googled it all the time looking for translations and although I could never find anything written anywhere about it I did discover that Quadron’s version is a cover. The original recording is from 1971 and done by two Danish hippies named Skousen & Ingemann.  

Finally, I emailed my old Danish roommate and asked him to translate. We hadn’t spoken since I left Denmark but he obliged. The translation is rough and weird but lyrics are, as expected, very beautiful.