Lyrics and Music
The song openly refers to Primo Levi's book If This Is a Man, in which the author recounts his experience in the concentration camps. On the back of the cover of the various formats, words in Hebrew "Zokher eth Ayom" are written and are also part of the lyrics. Farmer explained in an interview : "It is in Hebrew and it means exactly "Remember the Day", it is in the Torah. When I wrote this song, because (...) I have a bedside book called If This Is a Man precisely by Primo Levi, and which evokes the deportation and I wanted to talk about that (...), there are several possible readings but that's what I thought and to this idea, the need to remember these things." However, as stated by Instant-Mag, the song is "full of hope and resolutely turned towards the potentiality of human beings to overcome its hatred", while the book seeks to "prove that the concentration camps were able to make the man inhuman, removing the brotherhood and mutual aid". In its lyrics, "Souviens-toi du jour" is "the continuation and the antithesis of "Désenchantée", and is a plea for an alternation, a sublimated power, held by an ideal". Some words of the song also refer to a poem by French author Pierre Reverdy, Esprit pesant.
Read more about this topic: Souviens-toi Du Jour
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