April 16, 2023: Que Sera, Sera #1

Doris Day, incorrect song translations, my grandma, first newsletter.

Photo by Lisa Px on Unsplash

My grandma used to watch me and my cousins a lot. We’d crowd into her third floor walk-up apartment in Scranton and play Candyland on the blue-carpeted floor, or mess with the paperweights and figurines on her bookshelf, or try to open her umbrellas and walk around in her low heels. 

Meanwhile, a few feet away in her rectangular blue kitchen, my grandma would wash dishes or cut up tomato sandwiches. And sometimes, she’d sing. 

 “Que sera sera. Whatever will be will be.”

She hummed a lot, and sang under her breath, while she was at the sink with rubber gloves on or getting laundry from the basement, where she had a wire cage storage area for her things alongside those of the other tenants. That was my favorite place to go, because that’s where she kept the crafting supplies: hot glue guns, felt, toilet paper rolls, bunches of plastic flower blossoms and torn pages of comics or magazines. 

She’d put a babushka over the curls of her permed black hair and say, “Let’s take a walk.” Probably to tire us out. And sometimes, while we walked to nowhere in particular, she’d point out the bees on roadside echinacea, or fence-climbing morning glories, or yellow pockets of dandelions next to the potholes. While we were distractedly plucking flowers from the side of the road or poking roly poly bugs in the ground, she’d sing, low, then, too.

“The future's not ours to see. Que sera sera.” 

I can still hear the song in her deep, slightly vibrating voice. I’ve sung it to myself, at odd moments, for as long as I can remember.

I thought it was French. Because I was a child, and never stopped to think about it long enough once I became an adult.

My grandma was an intimidating and erudite retired Irish nurse who loved to surprise people. I’d watch her deliver every joke deadpan—she’d stare stonily and wait for the person on the receiving end to realize it was okay to crack up. 

She would talk to me in French at random intervals, peering down from behind thick square glasses. “Quelle heure est-il?” she’d ask. 

For the rest of my life, this phrase would pop into my head, the remnant of a dream I couldn’t pin. 

I didn’t know French, but I did know that back then, in my small world, “Quelle heure est-il?” meant “nap time.” I remember loving how she would ask me—not just because I didn’t mind naps as a kid—but because it felt like it was our private language. 

In 2023, I finally looked up what the words meant. “What time is it?”

At the same time, I finally looked up the song—linked in my memory as the two were—and found that "Que Sera, Sera" was sung by Doris Day.

It came out in 1956, for the Hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much, a thriller set in Morocco which Day starred in alongside James Stewart. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.  

I’m a sucker for the outsized role songs play in old movies: characters in the film performing them in-scene, the chords and lyrics tying whole plots together with a kind of naked emotional sincerity. The right song can transcend a lot of intellectualizing or explicating and get right to the watery heart of something.

Because there it is: Audrey Hepburn strumming “Moon River” all melancholy on a fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Ilsa telling Sam to play “As Time Goes By” on the piano in Casablanca and the tortured look on Rick’s face once he hears the first few notes. In The Man Who Knew Too Much, “Que Sera Sera” saves the couple’s child after he’s been kidnapped—the kid recognizes his mother desperately singing, and as he whistles along as loud as he can, they’re able to find him.

“Que Sera Sera” is an answer to a series of questions. The narrator asks someone—first their mother, then later, their partner, then a switch to their child asking them back: What’s going to happen next? How do I know what to expect in life?

The questions include “Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Will we have rainbows day after day?” and simply “What lies ahead?”

The answer is the melodic refrain: “Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be.” 

My grandma was born in 1928, so she would have been 28 when the song, described as “cheerily fatalistic,” came out. The cheeriness comes from the fact that the song is dreamy and sing-songy, a swaying tune that can linger in your head all day—or all your lifetime—but the fatalism in that the answer to all of these questions is that to know the future is impossible. 

The mother, the partner, you as caregiver—no one can promise anything. You live the best you can and accept that the ground is shifting, change is inevitable, and no security or reprieve, no matter how hard won, is final. 

At the time of the song, Grandma would have started having kids with a man she was mad about, have witnessed World War II. Her husband would leave her. She would go through nursing school, change her first name, raise eight kids, lose two in childbirth, and, later, babysit the grandkids every week while the woman downstairs banged a broom on the ceiling because we were being too loud. 

She’d be old and I’d be a kid and she’d be my sturdy, brilliant grandma and we’d walk up the hills to the wide green lawn area of Marywood, and pick long stems of white Queen Anne’s lace and blow dandelion heads off. 

And she would sing, “Que sera sera, whatever will be, will be.” 

As for the language she was singing—the song is decidedly not French, as I always thought. Nor is it Italian or Spanish or Portuguese. 

It’s apparently not grammatically correct in any Romance language, as it’s derived from an English-language misinterpretation. It was an incorrect Italian phrase ("che sarà sarà”) used in England in the 16th century, including by Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus. An—also incorrect!—Spanish version (“que sera”) appeared around the same time. 

The Doris Day version was written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who were referencing another ‘50s film, The Barefoot Contessa, a sexy drama about a Spanish actress in which the Italian "che sarà sarà" features, carved in stone. The lore is that Livingston and Evans liked the phrase in the film, and, for whatever reason, changed it to the Spanish spelling—which is the one that made it into the song, which is the one my grandma was singing to me in Scranton decades ago.

I’m delighted by the fact that a song whose answer is “you cannot have answers; you cannot have control” is also, itself, not in control, being that it’s a garbled combination of incorrect syntax from several languages that slipped into pop culture and stayed there, from Faustus to Doris Day. 

I’m also delighted that my shrugging lifetime misunderstanding of the song as French, and the fact that it’s a muddled mistranslation in the first place, only serves to prove the belief system of the song to be true at its heart. 

The song says “whatever will be will be”—we cannot control things—and the song itself is not even “correct” or in control. (Insert chef’s kiss emoji here.)

The error and inconsistency makes me love it all the more. There’s a charm to mistakes and misunderstandings that take root and stay. Tiny mistranslations that become their own entity entirely, that morph and last a century

But, the song’s attitude, as proven by its own incorrect lyrics, is not “whatever” as in “IDGAF”—it’s “whatever as in “whatever will be.” It advocates living as well and intentionally as you can, but with humility, as much grace and comedy as you can muster, and a healthy awareness of your many limitations. 

All that’s to say, this newsletter is named after the song. I’ll send out essays and musings similar to this one. And, other things. Whatever will be.

The truth is I don’t know exactly what this will be, but I do know there is some real joy and purpose in creating something, for me at least—and in giddily bucking a long held fear of the ever-present risk of being wrong.

And, in this essay going out to my grandma, who I miss terribly, and to Doris Day, because why not.

So, welcome to my newsletter. Que sera sera. We’re only human. Let’s take a walk. Hum a little tune in a language that doesn’t exist, and blow off the dandelion heads along the way. 

Thanks for reading this first post, if you actually got this far. As Meg Ryan would say, goodnight, dear void. See you in May!