#134, “La Complainte du partisan," Anna Marly (1943) / “The Partisan,” Leonard Cohen (1969)

150 Favorite Songs: #134, “La Complainte du partisan," Anna Marly (1943) / “The Partisan,” Leonard Cohen (1969)

Like pretty much everyone else who’s still alive, I know “La Complainte du partisan” not as the French original, which was written by Anna Marly in 1943, but because of the recording in English that Leonard Cohen made in 1969. I’m not sure if it was the first recording of the song made in English—the history is a bit spotty there—but it’s certainly the most haunting. I don’t really care for most other versions of the song (even Marly’s), but Leonard Cohen’s melodies on a folk song about the French Resistance was always going to resonate with me.

Anna Marly was a Russian-born immigrant to France who arrived when her family fled the Red Terror; she lived in Paris until 1940, when she fled yet again, after the Nazi invasion, this time to London. She was performing in the hostel she ran for French exiles in 1943 when she sang, in her native Russian, a folk song from the Red Army that was written in 1922, when she was five years old. That song’s name also translates into English as “The Partisan [Song],” and in the audience that night was Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, a key figure in the French Resistance. He encouraged her to translate the song into French; depending on who you ask, he may have written the lyrics himself, while Marly composed the melody. “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, was banned by the Nazis, and so the BBC would broadcast her recording of “La Complainte du partisan” (“The Partisan’s Lament”) into France as a surrogate anthem for the resistance.

This is just how folk music worked for a long time, more or less—a melody, or a lyrical theme, or a story, all get set down in one place, under one set of circumstances, and then picked up again by someone else, who sings the song however makes sense to them. Marly’s rendition of the song is most notable for her whistling, which is there not just to communicate the melody, but because the pitch of the whistling could pierce the static of the radio jammers used by the Nazis.

That folk tradition continued with Marly’s song, too, which was translated into English by Hy Zaret, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter who is famous for songs that ranged from the sublime (he wrote “Unchained Melody”) to the absurd (he also wrote “One Meatball”). Zaret’s version abstracted some of the specifics from Marly’s; she sang of “the Germans,” while he used a less-specific “the soldiers,” for example.

No one would remember Zaret translated the song—or, perhaps, remember that Marly ever wrote the original—if not for Leonard Cohen, though. Cohen’s version is in both English and French, and the English verses are more or less Zaret’s, while the French verses are Marly’s. Cohen talked quite a bit about his own work during his life, including about “The Partisan,” but to the best my knowledge he never said what, specifically, led him to reintroduce the song to the world. It’s not hard to imagine why, for a French-Canadian Jew who would have been around ten years old when Marly’s recording was prominent, the song might have stuck in his memory.

I've been fascinated with occupied France for a long time, and I don’t know the cause of effect of how that interacts with “The Partisan”—I might be interested in that time and place because of the song, or I might be fascinated by the song because it speaks to a part of history I’ve read so much about.

Regardless, the immediacy of the song is so striking and vivid. It recounts so many horrors—"There were three of us this morning / I'm the only one this evening”—in a tone that’s so nonchalant that it breaks your heart. There's a little bit of defiance left at the beginning, in a veiled threat, when Cohen sings that, while he's lost his wife and children, he "has many friends.” But that all fades before long. You never believe for a moment that the narrator expects to see the freedom he says soon will come.

Part of that is, perhaps, a product of the translation. The final line, in English, is “freedom soon will come / then we’ll come from the shadows,” which doesn’t sound entirely convincing; the way Leonard Cohen sings the line, it sounds like someone trying to convince himself, or maybe his many friends, that there’ll be a place for them in this future he sings about. In the original French, though, the line is “then we’ll return to the shadows,” and something about that frame reads as oddly hopeful to me—the idea that the work of being a partisan in occupied France is only a part of life because of the horrendous circumstances that necessitated it, and that as soon as it’s no longer necessary, that identity can shrink back into the shadows (to be picked up again by whoever needs that identity, when the circumstances make it necessary), rings truer to me, and thus more optimistic.

But what really strikes me about all of this is that when the song was written, none of this was history. By the time Leonard Cohen recorded it, of course, that’s exactly what it was. But Marly was writing of friends, people she knew. If d’Astier actually deserves the co-writing credit he sometimes gets for the song, then good lord, how much more raw can a song get? The people who heard this song on the radio, punctuated by Marly’s whistling, were likely the very same people she sang about, living in the woods and losing friends along the way, and finding inspiration in her voice.

France during World War II was impossibly complex. You have to admire the resistance, of course, while at the same time it's possible to understand why the rest of the country didn't have the stomach for the fight after the way its population was decimated in the first World War. But that sort of nuanced understanding of the situation is a luxury we get with distance. "The Partisan" is really just a propaganda song, and why wouldn't it be, when you think about the experiences of the people who wrote it, and their intentions for it, and the audience they had in mind. (Literally the whistling!) Music can mean so many different things.

But in the voice of Leonard Cohen, who sings it with such a simple weariness that he sounds like he’s reading a telegram, it’s less of an artifact and more of a piece of living history. It’s certainly one worth remembering.

If you’re still here, here’s a lovely version from 2021 by a young musician named Julien Chang, who adds new lines, casting the song in terms of the Spanish Civil War; one can fairly easily do the same with any fight against fascism.