More Samba

There's a 1 minute and 44 second song, by Chico Buarque, from the mid-1960s, the song is called "Tem mais samba," (loosely translated: "There's more samba") that I decided to translate. The lyrics are below, in English; they're just great lyrics. The original is below that.

There's more samba in the meeting than in the wait
There's more samba in meanness than in the wound
There's more samba in port than in the sail
There's more samba in forgiveness than in a goodbye
There's more samba in the hands than in the eyes
There's more samba in the ground than in the moon

There's more samba in the man who works
There's more samba in music from the street
There's more samba in the chest of those who cry ...

There's more samba in the tears of those who see
that good samba doesn't have a place or a time
Heart on the sleeve
Samba without meaning to
It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

It Comes and Goes
Your Suffering
If the whole world samba-ed
It'd be so easy to live

-----

Tem mais samba no encontro que na espera
Tem mais samba a maldade que a ferida
Tem mais samba no porto que na vela
Tem mais samba o perdão que a despedida
Tem mais samba nas mãos do que nos olhos
Tem mais samba no chão do que na lua
Tem mais samba no homem que trabalha
Tem mais samba no som que vem da rua
Tem mais samba no peito de quem chora
Tem mais samba no pranto de quem vê
Que o bom samba não tem lugar nem hora
O coração de fora
Samba sem querer
Vem que passa
Teu sofrer
Se todo mundo sambasse
Seria tão fácil viver

The Twisted Angel

I've decided to dedicate a post today to Torquato Neto (1944-1972), a Rio de Janeiro poet, lyricist and newspaper columnist who died young but enjoyed a short efflorescence in 1970s Brazil. His poems and lyrics are simple and honest, but I think emotionally incisive. It was his talent to put a few words together to explain the most complex worlds of feeling, which is why so many of Brazil's best-known musicians have utilized his lyrics. He's one of a certain kind of poet that seemed to flourish in Rio in the 1970s, people like Waly Salomão, Paulo Leminski, Ana Cristina Cesar, and others; either they were directly connected to the counterculture, as Leminski, Salomão and Neto were, or they shared a certain sensibility, a pessimism and self-involved dark-tinged romanticism that was nothing like the bombastic near utopianism and optimism of the Tropicália crew (Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, etc.), although the two groups intersected in many ways.

Essentially Nocturnal Poem

In the absence of someone,
today I'll also love the absence of the old feelings,
and I'll remember that the days once were sunlit
and the nights only dark
when we didn't know the word fear
or we didn't feel fear.

I'll love the old feeling of chaste tenderness
palpable, in those days, within me
or distributed among the big house's rooms
the front entrance's three steps,
the sun rising through the points of the mosquito net
and warming the walls of the nun's school
(it's just that these memories are not enough).

Because the person isn't there,
and I walk sad through the streets of Rio
and I arrive at no destination, because I have none
I will love the distance that separates me as a child
from myself here, desperate,
and I'll lose myself in the paths tangled up in one another
and I'll roll with pleasure in my shadow,
I'll cry afterward because I don't know how to return.

(translation by me)

There's a good website out there (in Portuguese), called "Twisted Angel," which is about his life and work. He committed suicide in 1972.

Five years without Mr. Sailormoon

Poet Waly Salomão, aka "Waly Sailormoon," was a key part of Brazil's literary/musical/artistic counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s and remained influential until his death in May 2003. He published criticism, poetry and wrote song lyrics for many of the greats to emerge out of the ferment of the Tropicália movement: Gal Costa, Maria Bethania and her kid brother Caetano Veloso, and perhaps most significantly, since their collaboration was a deep ongoing partnership between poet and musician: Jards Macalé.

With Macalé, Salomão wrote two of the best-known songs ("Vapor barato" and "Mal secreto") on Gal Costa's famous 1971 live album FA-TAL, Gal a todo vapor, a late brilliant product of Brazil's by-then beleaguered counterculture, which had gone semi-underground or been scattered to the four winds by the military dictatorship. Salomão also wrote a third song on that album, "Luz do sol," in collaboration with Carlos Pinto. Not only that, but he directed the live show, which went down as perhaps the most influential single live pop music performance in Brazilian history. This is how poet and journalist Torquato Neto described the show in the October 25, 1971 edition of his newspaper column "General Jelly," which evaded censorship with its cryptic, fragmentary, poetic, mystical language: "Gal's show, friends. FA-TAL is decisive, there's no drama in this fact. The poet Sailormoon, thank God, does not wash his hands. And how many blind and defeated people are out there, with well-scrubbed hands, my friends. Everything flowing, everything is an understatement, everything was on that stage ...

Macalé's second album Aprender a nadar (1974), a deeply textured and melodic sonic adventure, was also the product of a meeting of minds with Salomão. Their musical partnership was also anthologized in a more recent Macalé album called Real Grandeza. On its cover, there's a picture of the two chilling out together, in the hairy, bearded days of the so-called desbunde (slang that can be loosely translated as "letting loose"). This was the generalized term for the hedonistic, individualistic, somewhat post-ideological 1970s aftermath to the more protest-oriented late 1960s in Brazil.

Salomão is also known for his own poetry and a reflective critical biography of visual artist Hélio Oiticica called Qual É o parangolé? When he died, in May 2003, Salomão had been appointed four months before to head a national books promotion program by Culture Minister Gilberto Gil. In the Youtube video below, you can see Salomão recite part of his "Mal secreto" while sitting in a Rio bar; the song is then performed by Luiz Melodia.