i had no idea there were english-language songs in these books! so i looked it up and found this interview with Ann Leckie:
[T]here are three real-life songs in Ancillary Justice. Two of them are (shockingly enough) shape note songs—“Clamanda” (Sacred Harp 42) and “Bunker Hill” (Missouri Harmony 19). They’re songs that, for one reason or another, I connect with these characters and events.
The third is older than these two by a couple of centuries, but it shares their military theme. It’s “L’homme Armé,” and it seems like every late fifteenth-century composer and their pet monkey wrote a mass based on it. I exaggerate—I don’t think we have that many surviving Missas L’homme Armé by pet monkeys. But it was a popular song in its day.
i'm sure someone somewhere has already matched these songs with lyrics in Ancillary Justice, but a cursory search wasn't bringing it up, so i'm gonna do it here for my own reference. the song Breq sings in chapter 16 to calm herself right before leaving Justice of Toren forever
Oh, have you gone to the battlefield
Armored and well armed?
And shall dreadful events
Force you to drop your weapons?
corresponds to this verse of "Clamanda":
Oh! Have you ventured to the field,
Well armed with helmet, sword, and shield!
And shall the world, with dread alarms,
Compel you now to ground your arms?
while the song sung by the Valskaayan rebels that Breq recalls in chapter 14
Death will overtake us
In whatever manner already fated
Everyone falls to it
And so long as I'm ready
I don't fear it
No matter what form it takes.
corresponds to a stanza of "The American Hero: A Sapphick Ode" (the source of the lyrics for "Bunker Hill"):
Death will invade us by the means appointed,
And we must all bow to the King of Terrors;
Nor am I anxious, if I am preparéd,
What shape he comes in.
in chapter 21, Justice of Toren's sleeper agent override is a Valskaayan song:
You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.
All around the cry goes out, put on armor made of iron.
The person, the person, the person with weapons.
You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.
which corresponds to "L'Homme Armé" (The Armed Man), written in Middle French:
L'homme armé doibt on doubter.
On a fait partout crier
Que chascun se viegne armer
D'un haubregon de fer.
L'homme armé doibt on doubter.
of course, Breq's translation of "homme" is "person" instead of "man". it would be interesting to see how that song was rendered in the French translation of Ancillary Justice.
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