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.

Prologue to eternity translated

I've been working on an essay for the Quarterly Conversation about Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), an Argentine author who mentored the far more famous Jorge Luis Borges and lent him many of his key ideas in 1920s Buenos Aires, and yet receives little credit for it, at least outside of Argentina. Arguably, Borges the international literary legend, would not have existed without Macedonio as a precursor. Some of Borges's principal metaphysical ideas, the illusory nature of time, the trap of individual personality, the permeability of life to dreams and vice-versa, the love of paradox, can be traced back to Macedonio. Here is a small translated fragment, one of many prologues (which take up over half the novel), from Macedonio's posthumously published Museo de la Novela de la Eterna:

Prologue to Eternity

Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done, God heard this said to him, and he still had not created the world, nothing existed yet. That too already has been said to me, he countered perhaps, from the old, indented Nothing. And he began.

A popular musical phrase was sung to me by a Romanian woman, and later I rediscovered it ten times in different works and composers from the last four hundred years. Without a doubt, things don't begin; or they don't begin when they are invented. Or the world was invented ancient.

Prólogo a la eternidad

Todo se ha escrito, todo se ha dicho, todo se ha hecho, oyó Dios que le decían y aún no había creado el mundo, todavía no había nada. También eso ya me lo han dicho, repuso quizá desde la vieja, hendida, Nada. Y comenzó.

Una frase de música del pueblo me cantó una rumana y luego la he hallado diez veces en distintas obras y autores de los últimos cuatrocientos años. Es indudable que las cosas no comienzan; o no comienzan cuando se las inventa. O el mundo fue inventado antiguo.