opening the road for other Romanian bands

STILL MORE: Jokero (I like this combination of English and Spanish; also, Romanian and English)

EVEN MORE: Dragoste de inchiriat/(Romanian version): romantic guy gets dumped... very, very different from the crude English version (Kylie), probably not all that crude compared with what else is out there -- a lot of the rap songs, for instance... I'm not familiar with them so I just don't know how crude songs really get -- anyways, looks like it had plenty of success with the French, the Polish / live and... probably plenty of others

MORE: French kiss / 9 Mai (the Romanian version)/ in concert (in Poland); lyrics-wise, the Romanian and English version are very different

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Akcent, for instance, has had some success in Europe: King of Disco/Romanian version (parody) / The Making of King of Disco

Radu's last name

MORE: for those who need more details on this: aside from the "i" you find in most Latin based languages, Romanian has a variation of it which has a sign that looks like the roof of a house on top instead of the normal little dot; the letter "a" also has such a variation (the "roof top" instead of the dot). To make things even more confusing, what is considered correct spelling (spelled with "i" and roof top versus "a" and "roof top") has changed -- back and forth -- for arbitrary reasons in the past. Romanians are more like the French this way (they don't just allow the language to naturally change and go with it...: there is an Academia Romana -- you can see the "roof-top-a"-spelling on that page -- like there is an Academie Francaise)
...
He says it's "Sirbu" (means nothing in Romanian). A lot of people (including me) were confused and though it must have been "Sarbu" (which means "the Serb") and may well still be the truth...ultimately... not that Radu is lying -- I'm pretty sure the name in his documents is spelled "Sirbu" but... it's not at all uncommon for mistakes to change one's name in time; actually many of the differences in spelling of words in the different Latin-based languages, for instance, were just that: mistakes that became the norm in a particular part of the world...

Delia

language trouble for Radu...

Perfect body

... again, to bring them to Western cultural standards, the lyrics need a lot of work but the bigger problem here is that the poor fan (thestupidcarrie) seems to get disgusted by something that Radu is very likely completely unaware of..."let me feel you tonight..." --> say, what? :(... yeah, that's the normal reaction: how rude! how gross! how horrible..."nasty song," to quote Carrie above: it's just that that phrase never means those things in Romanian and Radu appears to have simply translated from Romanian into English without being aware of such differences...

and it goes both ways: e.g. calling a woman a bitch (in Romanian) is really asking for trouble... (the word means whore in that context, although it means the same thing as in English when talking about dogs)

Delia

P.S. Word for word is really a terrible way of translating things (I actually failed a translation test once, because the dummies wanted a word for word translation and I refused to come up with that sort of nonsense... those people should have known better, they were supposed to use that stuff for analysis purposes -- couldn't possibly understand even basic things the way the wanted to go about it...) D.

what's this all about?

just an attempt to figure out what made "the numa numa thing" what it was/is... whatever that may be; this is by no means a "fan blog" -- just an exploration of the extended topic (will look not only at the song itself and at the other O-zone songs but also at the post O-zone songs by Dan Balan, Arsenie Toderas and Radu Sarbu); I plan to do this pretty much the way I write my craigslist criticism blog (more or less, a record of my thoughts on the topic) D.