Translation of a Hungarian song about Mother and Father...

 Today, on the way to work, I was listening to old Hungarian songs on the car CD player. Suddenly I fell under the spell of this one about a Mother and Father. No doubt, just recently having become empty-nesters must have sensitized me to the gentle words, melody and orchestration of the song.

The singer is Kovács Kati, a well known singer with powerful, wide ranging voice who started in the late 1960s and is still active, I believe. This song is from somewhere in the late 1970s.

Listen to the song first and read the translation if the music caught your attention!

Click on the link below to hear the song:
Original enclosure (8i87t9cq23)

Here is an approximate, raw translation of the lyrics:

My Father knew the names of the stars
My Mother tended to the wounds of flowers
My Mother was the most beautiful in the eyes of my Father
My Father was a word  in the name of my Mother
My Mother knew my Father's footsteps
My Father liked how my Mother carried her years
My Mother was a cloud in the deep blue sky
My Father was a raindrop on a wet meadow
And the two of them came for me (refr.)

Few songs have the profound message of this one! I rarely feel such perfect harmony between the melody and the words of a song and Kovács Kati delivers it as no-one could match her.

With the hope that I can express the real meaning of the Hungarian lyrics in English better than the word-by-word translation, I also translated this song "freely", with my own words, only loosely following the original:

Fathers and Mothers

My Father used to know all the stars

And Mom proudly tended to her garden

She was the prettiest for him by far

And for her soul, Dad was the warden

Mom knew the footsteps of my Dad

And he liked the grace of her age

A cloud in the sky was my Mom, driven

Above misty meadows the color of faint gray

And they came for me…