Purely dance and sex and brilliance, spanning our history
Cayetano Filoso is one of Brazil’s most recognizable singers and composers, with two Grammy Award-winning albums dubbed “Bob Dylan of Brazil”. His works are not only the product of his outstanding musical talent and bold and innovative experiments, but also reflect the Brazilian intellectual landscape and his own spirit of rebellion.
British writer John Ryle was attracted by Feloso’s singing during a trip. Under the guidance of music, he traveled in Brazil’s rich natural history and interlaced social culture, and became the text of the latter’s new album “Nights of the North” English translator.
The article shared today is John Ryle’s “Hearing Brazil, Translating Cayetano”, published in the English literary magazine “Granta”, translated by the translator Zheng Yuantao with the author’s authorization and minor changes. His translation will take us, with limited mobility, to the other side of the earth, the continent of South America where we are wandering and dreaming.
For the songs of Cayetano mentioned in the article, the translator has compiled a collection on station b, some of which have been added with Chinese and Portuguese subtitles, and others will be added one after another. Welcome to click the picture to jump to listen ↑
Translator press
In June of this year, the third year of the global pandemic, I flew south from North America for more than ten hours and went to Rio de Janeiro to watch Caetano Veloso’s new solo album “My Coconut” in nine years. (Meu coco) for the concert. This is the first time I set foot on the soil of Brazil. I am far from perfect in Portuguese, and I have electronic performance tickets that I snapped up half a year ago in my mobile phone. Feloso was two months away from his eightieth birthday. Accompanied by six young musicians who have always worked closely together (three of them are responsible for Brazilian percussion), he sang 25 songs in a row. He has silver hair, elegant clothes, and a moving voice like water. It seems that this clear stream has become shallower, and the occasional sand and stone texture in the voice line is the trace left by the years on the riverbed.
In order to come to the front of the stage to see Feloso, he stood up and danced with the foreign audience, and even chanted a few times “Fora, Bolsonaro! Lula lá!” (Go, Bolsonaro! Lula will win!) , how long did it take me? Looking down, it’s a full twenty-five years. Similar to many Chinese audiences, I first met Feloso in Wong Kar-wai’s film “Breakthrough”: soon after the film started, there was a set of overhead shots of the magnificent scenery of Iguazu Falls, and the string music set off an elegant interpretation. The tenor, resentful and admiring, leaps above the turbulent flow. However, according to Filoso, the famous Mexican song “Cucurrucucú paloma” (Cucurrucucú paloma) , which he sang in the 1950s, was quoted by Wong Kar-Wai without prior knowledge, and he was once very surprised. A few years later, he appeared in person in “Talk to Her” by Almodovar, the film director, and performed “Dove” again, laying the most graceful foreshadowing for the tragic story in the film. As a teenager, I loved these movie scenes, but I lacked understanding of the breadth of Filoso’s work.
Stills of the movie “Happy Birthday”
Since the creation of the “Tropicalism” literary and artistic movement in Brazil in the late 1960s, Feroso’s artistic career has spanned more than half a century, singing in five languages: Portuguese, English, Spanish, French and Italian. Bob Dylan”. With the deeply humanistic spirit of the lyrics he writes, he really deserves to be compared to Dylan. However, his tenor voice that combines firmness and softness, clear and delicate tenor voice, full of South American dynamic rhythm and singing changes, straightforward and sexy stage image, and even experimental music style, are all distinct from Dylan. The author of this article, Professor John Ryle, who went to Brazil 36 years before me, said it well: “If there is one kind of contemporary music and song in the world that can stand up to the English pop song that dominates the world, it is MPB (Brazilian Pop). .” The more I listened, the more I realized that my visceral identification with MPB was a quest for freedom and improvisation.
In the more than 400 songs Feroso has composed, the lyrics are the seeds from which the music grows; he plays the guitar without reading music, and his inspiration always starts with a few word fragments that he tries to sing. As a whole, his works are like a luxuriant tree with vertical and horizontal roots, deeply rooted in the diverse cultural soil of Brazil. His references are numerous, contain fragments of personal emotional memory, and integrate historical and cultural allusions. And the classics of legends, musical predecessors and peers, also often describe the rapid changes of contemporary life, such as the new album “Twisted Angels” (Anjos tronchos) , the central image comes from the classic Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de ·Andrade (Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poems, the content is closely related to the contemporary time, about the fission brought by the Silicon Valley giants to the world. Although Feroso’s musical charm transcends language, it is a pity that if you don’t try to understand the meaning of the lyrics, you will miss a large part of the essence of the work. So while I was learning Portuguese, I was authorized to translate this text by John Ryle, hoping to listen to Brazil more deeply with more music fans. The Portuguese lyrics in the text have all been taught by a music fan who graduated from a foreign language institution with a Portuguese major, but the responsibility for the text is conceited, and I sincerely pray for criticism and correction.
Photo taken by the translator at the Cayetano Filoso concert
Hear Brazil, translated by Cayetano
Written by: [English] John Ryle
Translated by: Zheng Yuantao
In the second half of the 1980s I lived in Salvador, Bahia, studying Portuguese. I don’t spend much time in class. There is a beach at the end of the street. Candomblé sanctuaries are scattered between the city and the surrounding slums, protruding from the surrounding groves and attracting passers-by – El Salvador is the ancient capital of Brazil, a slave port with a long history, and this religion originated in Africa prevails .
On weekends, I often go to a Candombre sanctuary outside the city, which is farther than the airport, surrounded by trees, on the leeward side of the dunes, and very close to the sea. The name of the temple is Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú, which means “House of Sanggou Power”, and Sanggou is the Yoruba deity enshrined in it. In the temple, the drums of the African gods were summoned, mixed with the roar of planes and the tidal waves in the distance. On Saturday night, this poor black district between urban and rural areas will hold music and dances dedicated to the gods. The believers, dressed in gorgeous 19th-century style dresses, sing hymns in Yoruba as the drum beats. Allow the gods of West Africa to possess yourself in a trance. It’s also an escape for me outside of grammar studies.
Priestess of the House of Power in Sango, Barbino, 1972 or 1973 (photo by Pierre Figger)
DISCOVER Cayetano
When I first arrived in El Salvador, I stopped at the Anglo-Americano in the city, where I stayed Monday through Friday for five dollars a night. The hotel overlooks Halloween Bay, and the city lies on the edge of this large bay.
“San Salvador by the Bay of All Saints” – let me write its full name – is a seaside city with a safe haven, bordering a fertile interior, the center of colonial Brazil from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, slaves The staging point for trade, that trade, fuels the cane sugar industry in the interior. Sugar and slaves made the baroque churches and civic buildings scattered in the city center, most of which have so far fallen into rat-infested ruins. The Anglo-American Hotel was built late, when the flashy atmosphere had faded, but this early nineteenth-century building was also yellowed and dilapidated, standing on the cliff in front of the harbour, just outside the old city. In the middle of a row of bright and clean white high-rise buildings, it looks like a stubborn tooth that is uncoordinated.
I like Anglo-American Inn. Although I complained in a letter from home that the breakfast coffee was thin and weak and the milk was made from powdered milk, the view of the bay was breathtaking. I would sit by the window for hours on end, fascinated by the kaleidoscopic light: the wind blowing, turning the water from a thin sheet of silver-gray metal to wrought bronze, the rust-colored rust of the oil tanker moorings. Here, at my most intoxicating moment, I feel like I live in a sensual seaside version of the “terra em transe” (terra em transe) that I came to Brazil to seek. Here, in the City of All Saints, I long for the miracle of Pentecost, and hope that my eloquence will be blessed to be integrated into the language that the people sing and speak.
The Anglo-American Hotel is on the radio all day long, and Brazilian pop music of all genres pours like a waterfall: samba, pagode, frevo, afoxé, choro , bossa nova, seresta, and jazz. The music and the sunlight pouring into the room seem to merge into one. It was at the Anglo-American Hotel that I discovered Caetano Veloso one morning in leisure and intoxication.
My term—“discovery”—would feel weird to Brazilians: Cayetano is Brazil’s most reputable musician and one of its most famous nationals. The forty or fifty albums he has released since 1967 have defined the musical period after bossa nova: beginning with Tropicália (Tropicália, an art and cultural movement of the sixties, Caye Tano’s radical innovation was halted abruptly by the intervention of the dictatorial military government; Cayetano and his best friend Gilberto Gil, also a tropicalist musician, were forced to leave London, England, Fang was able to return to settle in China in 1972; for nearly 50 years thereafter, Cayetano continued to exert his vigorous creativity and made outstanding achievements in music, film and literature.
If anyone is the spiritual personification of modern Brazilian pop, representing its eclectic rhythm and instrumental complexity, cultural depth and phrasing, it’s Cayetano. But I knew nothing about it in 1986. I only knew the surface of record jackets—the sunset was still good for vinyl records—and my understanding of the language was just beginning.
Most of the records sold at market stalls are MPB (abbreviation for Music Popular Brasileira, or Brazilian pop music) compilations of popular songs from the classic era. The lyrics were printed on the record jacket, and gradually I could separate the words of the song I was listening to. A large part of the written Portuguese I learned was accumulated in this way. Scanning the enigmatic texts on these “Os Grandes Compositores do Brasil” (Brazilian Master Composer) records, I struggled to find every clue about this strange country, every entrance to the tropical Portuguese-speaking world.
I am fortunate to be on the right starting point. If there is one type of contemporary music and song in the world that can stand up to the English-language pop that dominates the world, it is MPB. It originated from the local folk music of Brazil. It has evolved over many generations. It is popular in El Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Paulo. The urban dance music of nightclubs and the melody of concert halls are still its descendants. Despite the music’s world-renowned reputation, most of its old and new songs are only now reaching the ears of non-Portuguese-speaking listeners. In my budding record collection at the time, the main artists were figures long considered immortal in Brazil – João Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Tom Tom Jobim, Elis Regina—their names exude that sonic parallel universe. And Cayetano has earned a place in my collection as well.
The miracle of the people
After staying at the Anglo-American Hotel, and going downstairs for breakfast the first day or two, I heard a radio song called “Milagres do povo” (Mirage of the People). It was the theme song for a recent TV series that aired that year, based on the novel Tenda dos Milagres (Tenda dos Milagres) by Bahia author Jorge Amado.
The Canopy of Miracles, Yilin Press, 2016
“Quem é ateu e viu milagres como eu…” begins the song.
I couldn’t even break down the words of the song word for word at the time, but there was a certain clarity in the tenor’s voice that was unforgettable, unlike the cookie-cutter sweetness and rhythm of the hits on the local FM station. Later, I spent time thinking about the direction of the lyrics and the meaning of the sentences. Miracles of the People is about African gods, who are worshipped in Candombray temples (like the Sango House of Power where I spend my weekends).
“An atheist who has seen miracles like me,” Cayetano sings:
Sabe que os deuses sem Deus
Não cessam de brotar
Nem cansam de esperar
E o coração que é soberano e que é senhor
Não cabe na escravidão
Não cabe no seu não
Não cabe em si de tanto sim
É pura dança e sexo e glória
E paira para além da história
know the gods without a god
won’t stop sprout
won’t give up waiting
And the sovereign mind, the sovereign of all
not trapped in slavery
not trapped in your denial
won’t back away from so many affirmations
Pure dance and sex and brilliance
spanned our history
The Canopy of Wonders 1977 film adaptation poster
The refrain that follows is very useful to a Portuguese learner, as it is equivalent to a chanting exercise of the different vowel combinations in the language. It goes like this:
Ojuobá ia lá e via
Ojuobahia
Auruoba is here to see
ajou bahia
The interlude—the centerpiece of the song in the middle of the verse—calls the names of the gods of Candombre. They are Orisha, the gods of West Africa, whose names and attributes I have seen at the ceremonies in that temple farther than the airport.
“Xangó manda chamar,” the song sings, “Obatalá guia…”
Xangô manda chamar
Obatalá guia
Mamãe Oxum chora
Lagrimalegria
Pétala de Iemanjá
Iansã-Oiá ria
Sanggo calls
Obatala leads the way
Oshun’s mother cried
happy tears
Yemanya spreads the petals
Smoke scattered – Oia smiled
Having spent many mornings at the Anglo-American Hotel and immersed in the evening rituals of the Candombre deity, I began to understand the weight and significance of The Miracle of the People. It sings about how black slaves re-established African belief systems in the New World, a historical tradition that is real life in El Salvador. As the months passed, I came to appreciate how vast the pantheon of Candombre had on Bahia poets and singers. These African gods—Obatara, Oshun, Yemanya, and a dozen others—rule pop music in Bahia culture, just as the Greco-Roman gods once did in Renaissance Europe occupy the mainstream of art and literature. Meanwhile, for adherents of Candombre and other religions of African origin, the orishas are not just symbols but living gods and goddesses: the rhythm of the god-calling beat drums as the ceremony took place on Saturday night City.
Cayetano (left) and Jose Saramago (center) at the Bahia home of Jorge Armado (right), 1996.
a democrat half-blood
All this has long been a deep source of energy that has always injected Bahia music, and this inexhaustible well of culture is shared by Afro-Bahians, other local residents, and all Brazilians. . Like most artists and writers in Bahia, Cayetano was fascinated by Candombre; he himself embodied this cultural hybrid. In ” Sugar Cane Fields Forever ,” a parody of the Beatles’ title, he describes himself as a “murato, a democratic mulatto. Tow”.
Sou um mulato nato
No sentido lato
Mulato democrático do litoral
I’m a native Murato
in a broad sense
murato of the seaside democrats
Feige in his later years
The “Miracle of the People” also mentioned a man I later met in El Salvador, the venerable French photographer and ethnologist Pierre Verger. Feige lived in the city for many years, and later lived in a low-income neighborhood called “American Village”. He was deeply immersed in the Brazilian religion of African origin. He was a recorder and a practitioner, and he even held a position in the ancient Candombre Sanctuary in the city. The shrewd Candombre priests and priestesses gave him a gaudy title dedicated to the eldest son, “Ojuobá”, which means “Eye of the King” in Yoruba. So Cayetano’s lyric in tribute to Fage and his city has this pun in it:
Auruoba is here to see
ajou bahia
Feige was also a frequent visitor to the sanctuary, which was farther than the airport, where I used to pass the time. The priest there – called “the Holy Father” (pai-de-santo) – Balbino Daniel de Paula, was his friend and had been under his shadow. I met Feige in the temple presided over by Balbino. Later I checked out of the Anglo-American Hotel, and spent a few months interim in a small house behind Fage’s house as his guest in El Salvador. Using this time, I brought myself closer to the African traditions of the city: I learned from my teacher capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that originated in Africa and has recently become popular around the world, and I also read Feige’s collection of books. Listen to music on the radio.
Capoeira war dance practice (Photo by Pierre Féger)
There is no way not to listen. The neighbors in America Village are playing music day and night. Occasionally, old songs from Cayetano wafted over the radio waves, referring to various parts of the city, areas on the outskirts of El Salvador with African names like Calabar, like Curuzu. One of the songs is called “Beleza pura” (Beleza pura).
“Não me amarra dinheiro não…” the song begins:
Não me amarra dinheiro não
Mas formosura
Dinheiro não
A pele escura
Dinheiro não
A carne dura
Dinheiro não
Don’t tie me up with it, no money
But ask for Peugeot
no money
to dark skin
no money
to firm the carcass
no money
Moça preta do Curuzu
Beleza pura
The pretty girl in Kuruzu
so beautiful
…
Não me amarra dinheiro não
Mas elegância
Don’t tie me up with it, no money
But be elegant
…
Moço lindo do Badauê
Beleza pura
Badauer’s handsome boy
so beautiful
On the streets and beaches of El Salvador, it’s not hard to spot handsome boys from Badauer (the name of a carnival team in town) and dark-skinned teenage girls from the nearby Curuzu neighborhood. At dusk, when the light is enchanting, the sun slants across the skin of passers-by—especially on Fridays, when many of the city’s inhabitants put on white and pay homage to Orissa, the father of all Orissa, when El Salvador is filled with a sense of timelessness. nice.
Cayetano returned to Bahia for the first time in 1971
“Poetry is to prose as love is to friendship”
Around this time, I met Cayetano. I was introduced to him by a Bahia intellectual, Paul Cesar de Souza, a young and promising translator of Nietzsche and Freud. Joining us at the party was João José Reis, a professor at the Federal University of Bahia who studies the history of slavery. It was Friday, the holy day of Oshara, and Cayetano, all white and slender, chatted quietly in a corner of the room.
It’s clear from who Cayetano chooses to associate with that he has a huge interest in literature and ideas that sets him apart from any pop musician I’ve met in Europe or America. His later memoir , Verdade tropical, is a testament to that, with references to modernist poetry, contemporary European and American philosophies, all of which are uniquely combined with the cultural history of Brazil.
In Brazil, popular culture and high culture have always been more closely related than in English-speaking countries. It was the modernist poet Vinicius de Moraes who wrote the lyric for Bossanova’s ” Garota de Ipanema “, while Cayetano’s contemporary Siko · Chico Buarque, the lead singer of a new generation of bossa nova, wrote several avant-garde novels. Cayetano’s uniqueness lies in his combination of literary and popular, lyrical and philosophical, and more importantly, the high cultural awareness he injects into the style of pop music.
“I like to feel my tongue touching (roçar) Louis de Camons’ tongue,” he sings provocatively and raps in Língua (Língua ). (Translation: In Portuguese both “tongue” and “language” are língua; similarly, there is a word tongue that can refer to both in English.) The song celebrates the greatest Portuguese poets, Camos and Fernando Pessoa, and the Brazilian writer Guimaránis Rosa, known for his short story “The Third Bank of the River.” The lyrics play with two Portuguese verbs that both mean “to be” and “to be”—ser for constancy, estar for ever-changing conditions—and show the difference they reflect Existing form.
In fact, the word roçar—and Cayetano pointed out to me later when I showed the English translation of the lyrics to me—means more physical than “touch,” almost lingering. In his opinion, this is a better translation:
Gosto de sentir a minha língua roçar a língua de Luís de Camões
Gosto de ser e de estar
…
Gosto do Pessoa na pessoa
Da rosa no Rosa
E sei que a poesia está para a prosa
Assim como o amor está para a amizade
I like to feel my tongue rubbing against Louis de Cammons’ tongue
like ser and estar
…
i like pessoa in people (pessoa)
rose in rosa
And know what poetry is in prose
as love is to friendship
A few years after “Language”, Cayetano recorded an album called “Books” (Livro) , titled “Books” (Livros, plural), talking about his work in the 1940s and 1950s. San Amaro spent his childhood, a small town an hour’s drive from El Salvador, when books were still a rarity, a symbol of the outside world. The song itself is constructed on the basis of a literary reference: that is the poem O livro ea América (O livro ea América) by the Bahian author Castello Alves. The words and sentences, as typical of singers, are full of energy and ambiguous.
Cayetano sings:
Os livros são objetos transcendentes
Mas podemos amá-los do amor táctil
Que votamos aos maços de cigarro
Domá-los, cultivá-los em aquários
Em estantes, gaiolas, em fogueiras
Ou lançá-los pra fora das janelas
(Talvez isso nos livre de lançarmo-nos)
Ou — o que é muito pior — por odiarmo-los
Podemos simplesmente escrever um
Encher de vãs palavras muitas páginas
E de mais confusão as prateleiras
Books are transcendent objects
But we can caress them
as we do to packs of cigarettes
tame them and keep them in a fish tank
On the shelf, in the cage, into the fire
or throw it out the window
(maybe save ourselves from jumping off the building)
Or – which is much worse – to express resentment
Let’s just write another
Pages filled with empty words
Columns of bookshelves multiply chaos
Cayetano and his memoir “Tropical Reality” 20th Anniversary Edition (2017), the cover is him in the period of tropicalism.
Encountering Brazilian Politics
With the guidance of Cayetano’s songs, my initial understanding of Brazil deepened. Those songs reflect every aspect of national life – politics, culture, history, regional spirit. He writes himself in the terroir, in the heart of the country: El Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo – the songs Cayetano wrote for these cities are among his most famous and become the collective memory of Brazilians. Listening to them is like first coming to England and hearing the Beatles, or first coming to America and hearing Bob Dylan.
Later, when I returned to England, I found myself still obsessed with Brazilian music and my interest in the incredible rituals of the Brazilian religion of African origin. In the 1980s, when vinyl gradually gave way to CDs, I returned to Brazil frequently, and every time I went back to China, I would definitely add many new records to my luggage, and my understanding of the content of singing became more and more clear. stand up.
In 1990, however, personal life and politics met narrowly, and my trip to Brazil had to come to an end. That year I went to Brasilia and interviewed the newly elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello, and wrote a profile for the Sunday Times in London. Colroll was a young, charismatic figure with a huge popularity, but my article cast doubt on him, specifically reporting on several brewing scandals involving him. This article caused a lot of criticism in Brazil. The media denounced it at length (or these media, seized the opportunity to give a very long account of the drama); President Collor sued The Sunday Times for defamation, and the newspaper hurriedly reached an out-of-court settlement.
My Brazilian friends see the incident as a joke – they’re used to the corruption of their country’s politicians. But some friends advised me to be prudent and not to come to Brazil for the time being. They reminded that President Colroll’s father, also in politics, shot and killed a political opponent in the Senate, but used a trick to use senatorial privileges to save his congressional seat without going to jail.
Eighteen months have passed. President Collor’s malfeasance was well documented and involved more than I and most people could imagine. Brazil’s Veja published a lengthy interview with President Collor’s own brother, detailing his brother’s poor morals and the shocking inside story of the authorities’ fiscal corruption. At this time, the Brazilians, who have been used to seeing politicians stealing the country for many years, felt unbearable. Soon after, Colroll, who was facing impeachment, resigned and was ruled not to hold public office for eight years.
It was another year or two before I returned to Bahia. At this time, I was shown a text from El Salvador’s largest newspaper , A Tarde , which I read to my satisfaction. It reads:
Does anyone still remember John Ryle? Let us help you relive an old memory: He was the first journalist to make real accusations against former President Collor de Mello. The British newspaper that published the article paid a hefty fine for it. Shouldn’t the Brazilian government be returning the money now as a matter of justice?
As far as I know, the Sunday Times never asked for that money back, nor did it report the fall of President Collor. I haven’t written for them since.
Before I had the chance to return to Brazil, Pierre Figger, French photographer and ethnologist, my former spiritual teacher and host of residence, died in El Salvador at the age of ninety-three. In London, I sat down to write about his life. I reopened the Cayetano translation that I did a few years ago. Facing a blank screen, I imagined myself in El Salvador in the 1940s, when Feige arrived from France and Cayetano was growing up in the small hinterland of San Amaro. From a fan site, I downloaded the Portuguese lyrics for “The Miracle of the People,” which I first heard at the Anglo-American Hotel many years ago. I started over to translate it into English.
The second verse of the two verses of “The Miracle of the People” reads: “Obá é no xaréu / Que brilha prata luz no céu…”
Obá é no xaréu
Que brilha a prata luz do céu
E o povo negro entendeu
Que o grande vencedor
Se ergue além da dor
Tudo chegou sobrevivente num navio
Quem descobriu o Brasil
Foi o negro que viu
A crueldade bem de frente e ainda produziu milagres
De fé no extremo ocidente
Quemé ateu?
Auba’s spirit is in the sea fish
Silver scales sparkle when the sky illuminates
And black people know
great victor
will rise in distress
Everything here comes from surviving slave ships
discoverer of brazil
are black, they see
The cruelty in front of me still creates the miracle of faith
in this far west
Who is an atheist?
Quem é ateu? The last line of the Cayetano song returns to the first, but this time with a rhetorical question: who can really be an atheist? He was asking: When you draw inspiration from a culture of faith, then in what sense can you be called an atheist? It can be seen that Cayetano’s thoughtful thinking makes pantheism and reason dance together. In order to deepen my understanding, I have to write a written translation. So I was drawn back to Cayetano’s earlier songs and then translated the works of other Brazilian poets and singers, including Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João João Cabral de Melo Neto, with Vinicius de Moraes.
Poet Vinicius de Morais (second from left) with Bahia artists, third from right is Cayetano
Translation work
Not long after, towards the end of 2000, at a party hosted by my London neighbors Melissa North and Zac Chassey, I met Cayetano again: still the skinny Elegant figure, neatly dressed, black suit buttoned up high, hair now a little gray. He was accompanied by his wife Paula Lavigne. I learned from our conversation that Paula had recently finished a documentary on Pierre Fage, which included Fage’s last interview, and he died the day after the filming.
I mentioned my translation of The Miracle of the People. A few days later, at Cayetano’s request, a translation was emailed to him. Also at the end of the year, he wrote to me asking if I would be interested in translating the lyrics for the US version of his new album Noites do norte .
Some music critics in Brazil gave “Nights of the North” a moderate evaluation, but I appreciate the mellow feeling of Cayetano’s maturity in it. In this way, I relive the joy of his music, and go upstream, to swim in the cultural history of Brazil. Many of the songs on the album were born in El Salvador’s cultural mix with African and European elements, and were born out of the legacy of slavery. The name “Nights of the North” itself is a work of the nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist leader Joaquim Nabuco. With the symphony accompaniment of the album’s eponymous song, Cayetano sings an astonishing phrase written by Nabucco like a recitative:
A escravidão permanecerá por muito tempo como a característica nacional do Brasil. Ela espalhou por nossas vastas solidões uma grande suavidade; fosse uma religião natural e viva, com os seus mitos, suas legendas, seus encantamentos; insuflou-lhe sua alma infantil, suas tristezas sem pesar, suas lágrimas sem amargor, seu silêncio sem concentração, suas alegrias sem causa, sua felicidade sem dia …É ela o suspiro indefinível que exalam ao luar as nossas noites do norte.
Slavery will remain a national feature of Brazil for a long time to come. It spreads a great softness into our vast solitude; it leaves its first imprint on our virgin ground, and it remains long; it spreads here as if a natural and ever-growing religion, with its own Myths, legends, spectacles; it breathes, breathes out its childish spirit on the earth, its sorrows without heavy, tears without resentment, silence without focus, joy without a reason, not the joy of tomorrow… …it is an indefinable but audible sigh on our northern nights with the bright moon.
Like “The Miracle of the People,” this passage contains a delicate balance of sentiments that acknowledge (but do not endorse) the profound and lasting effects of slavery on the nation of Brazil. As someone who has written English and Italian songs and translated English lyrics into Portuguese, Cayetano took great pains to convey the passage accurately in the translation. He cared even more than caring about how his lyrics were translated, and offered countless suggestions for improvement. In London’s winter, I would get up in the dark mornings, work on this song and the rest of the album, and email the translation to Bahia in midsummer, five thousand miles away. He will reply quickly, discuss some details of the translation, and accept the rest.
The new album is not only about Brazil’s past, but also some purely lyrical songs. In “Sou seu sabiá” (Sou seu sabiá) , the staccato rhythm in the last few lines of each passage simulates the cry of Brazil’s national bird, the red-breasted sabiá.
Sou seu sabiá
Não importa onde for
Vou te catar
Te vou cantar
Te vou, te vou, te dou, te dar
I am your songbird
wherever you go
i’m looking for you
I want to sing to you
I want to come, I want to come, I want to give, I want to come to you
It is a joy to hear this voice again. For me, Cayetano has become the embodiment of Portuguese charm. I think of the mornings I spent many years ago at the Anglo-American Hotel, when I was naive and full of yearning, my love for this country not yet tempered by my own experience—the storm of being caught up in Brazilian politics—when all I could do was dream Step into the Portuguese-speaking world, let the flames of Pentecost come, and refine my speaking ability.
Back and front cover of the Northern Nights CD
The miracle of Pentecost
The miracle of Pentecost, in a sense, does happen, although it is not a tongue of fire from heaven, but more like a red fire, a slow-burning thing, a little bit by the breath, by the speech itself Be cooked until it has enough light to shine on you and find your way in a new language. Translating Cayetano is an opportunity to rekindle this light, so that I can revive the memory of that city, that country, that language incarnate in him, so that I can relive the fascination of El Salvador many years ago. Feeling: Watching the boys of Badauai and the girls of Kuruzu roaming the streets in the twilight, the call of love is the voice of the city at this moment.
That’s the path Cayetano himself took many years ago, when he explored the idea of translation in a song called ” Trilhos Urbanos .” The song sings to the street corners and tram tracks, and the lines of lyrics all lead to the past time and the urban style of childhood. In the song, the act of translation becomes a metaphor for memory itself, a metaphor for redemption of the past.
Sitting at a desk on a cold, dark morning in winter, “Nights of the North” blaring on the stereo, and the rumble of Hammersmith and City Line trains from afar, the lyrics seemed fitting:
Bonde da Trilhos Urbanos
Vão passando os anos
E eu não te perdi,
Meu trabalho e te traduzir
Street car Mercedes Benz on city track
Years go by
and i didn’t lose you
my job is to translate you
——-
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