May 2007
	Monday 21 May A letter from Germany:
		Dear Dave, About the lyrics of HIROSHIMA! there are two lines in the text which are not easy to understand, especially for Germans! ..The lines are in the first verse: This is the official printing by the German publisher Global: Where he passed the moon... Beneath the oddest moon.... in the web there is a version like that: where he'd pass the noon... 'neath the August moon Can you tell me which are the correct lines?? - a German English teacher asked me .. because he want to use the song in his English lesson to teach listening to the English language! All the best,    Andreas Hedler
	Dear Andreas, ...please tell your German colleagues not to feel bad -  the words are pretty oblique in English too! They try to project an image of the story, bounded as always by the meter of the music. Here is verse one as I wrote it:
		There's a shadow of a man at Hiroshima, where he'd pass the noon In a wonderland at Hiroshima 'neath the August moon ---------------------------------- The second line is my way of saying: where he would pass the time of day ('noon' being a time of day) ie. the shadow is where he would normally have been going about his business. The third line uses an old-time english word 'neath' (I may have made it up but I think it's from Shakespeare. Anyway, it is a compaction of the word 'beneath') to explain that the man lived in Japan (the land of the august moon) and that it was indeed August when all this happened (August 6, 1945). The picture I want to paint is of someone in Hiroshima passing the time of day beneath (and in) the moon of august.. The lyric is always in pursuit of the core truth that the shadow is all that remained ... The song came out of the shadow! I read the bizarre report about the stone steps of a downtown building bleached perfectly white by the blast of the a-bomb everywhere EXCEPT where someone had been at that moment... A shadow etched into stone was the only evidence ... That's where the song came from.   I am of the opinion that what is important in a song is not so much the literal meaning meant by the writer but the feeling or picture the listener gets from hearing it. Because of that I am often reticent to explain MY meaning of a song because it might mess up YOUR meaning, which carries a special validity for you. But I understand the problem my lyric has created in the land where my song was so successful. Maybe if you guys had known what it meant you wouldn't have bought it? .... Dave