You'll see him in your nightmares / You'll see him in your dreams

Des paroles pour une fois assez narratives, celles du morceau Red Right Hand de Nick Cave, que je diffusais tantôt dans Top Tape.
On y retrouve un assassin manipulateur (de la pire engeance, donc) qui rappelle le pasteur de La Nuit du Chasseur (joué par Robert Mitchum) (1955)

Take a little walk to the edge of town, go across the tracks
Where the viaduct looms like a bird of doom, as it shifts and cracks
Where secrets lie in the border fires, in the humming wires,
Hey man you know you're never coming back
Past the square, past the bridge, past the mills past the stacks
On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man
In a dusty black coat with a red right hand.

He'll wrap you in his arms tell you that you've been a good boy
He'll rekindle all the dreams it took you a lifetime to destroy.
He'll reach deep into your soul, steal your shrinking soul
but there wont be a single thing that you can do
He's a god, he's a man, he's a ghost, he's a guru
They're whispering his name though this disapearing land
But hidden in his coat is a red right hand

You dont own no money? He'll get you some
You don't have no car? he'll get you one
You dont have no self respect you feel like an insect,
Well dont you worry buddy 'cause here he comes
Through the ghettos and the barrio and the bowery and the slums
A shadow is cast wherever he stands
Stacks of green paper in his red right hand

You'll see him in your nightmares, you'll see him in your dreams
He'll appear out of no where but he aint what he seems
You'll see him in your head, on the TV screen
And hey buddy, I'm warning you to turn it off
He's a ghost, he's a god, he's a man, he's a guru
You're one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan
designed and directed by his red right hand.

["A shadow is cast wherever he stands"]
[L'ombre du prédateur, dans la nuit du chasseur et M le Maudit ]

Une deuxième version de ce morceau devait être enregistrée un peu plus tard, pour Murder Ballads (1996), sous le titre "Song of Joy" (c'est le morceau d'ouverture de 9minutes avec les La la la la la la la la la la, pour ceux qui l'ont en tête).

Nick Cave y chante :

They never caught the man
He's still on the loose
It seems he has done many many more
Quotes John Milton on the walls in the victim's blood
The police are investigating at tremendous cost
In my house he wrote "his red right hand"
That, I'm told is from Paradise Lost

Et effectivement, la locution "Red Right Hand"vient du long poème épique en 10 chapitres qu'est Paradise Lost (1667) :

What if the breath that kindl'd those grim fires
Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage
And plunge us in the flames? or from above
Should intermitted vengeance arm again
His red right hand to plague us?

Pour être tout à fait complet, je me dois de citer la note de pied de page, relative à cette référence :

Red Right Hand: The phrase appears to be a translation of "rubente dextera" from Horace, Odes1.2.2-3.

Texte et traduction complètes de cette ode à Auguste César, aka Octave, ici

Nick Cave, Red Right Hand
Let Love In (Mute, 1994)
www.myspace.com/nickcaveandthebadseeds

Nick Cave, Murder Ballads (Mute, 1996)
Charles Laughton, La Nuit du Chasseur (1955)
Fritz Lang, M Le Maudit (1931)
John Milton, Le Paradis Perdu (1667)
Horace, Odes (-0023)

(Les liens relatifs à ces oeuvres sont disséminés dans l'article)