"Paisaje"
"Landscape Painting"

What a fascinating thing—the way art can mysteriously transform something and give it a new nature. What is this process that makes things more than what they are? Letters on a piece of paper, or colors on a canvas, or movements around a room somehow become more than just words or colors or physical movements. And music may be the most mysterious transformation of all.

How is it possible to make vibrations in the air into something more? How, for example, is it possible to make sound waves become a certain time of year? Obviously there are birds chirping in the summer, and the winter is sometimes quieter—but I don’t normally think of the seasons as having a different sound. Yet after I translated this tango, it began to sound like autumn. Not just the words—but the music itself! It began to sound like "the ache of autumn". Like the sound of fall slipping into winter. How do you put something into the cadence and the tone of an orchestra that does that?

 

 

I'm always looking for words to describe the music on these pages. But it doesn't take very long before you run out of adjectives. I like these tangos so much that I keep falling back on descriptions like "great" or "beautiful" or "important". But then what's left? You can go to "really great" and "very beautiful". Then there's "fantastic", or "really, really great"—but it gets silly fast. Still, I have to say it: This vals really is very beautiful. These feelings always change, but lately I've begun to think of Paisaje as possibly the most beautiful of all the tangos. When I hear it in a milonga, it carries me away with the smell of damp leaves and autumn rain.

But Paisaje is also very difficult—both to translate, and to dance to. Translation difficulties generally fall into two categories. The first is the poetry problem. Language was basically created to communicate ideas as clearly as possible—but poets have another agenda. Poetry is word art, and poets use words in ways that go far beyond listing the contents of a cereal box. They break rules. They use the sounds of the words themselves to convey meaning, and their language carries a heavy dose of the culture in which they live. The result can be something like the figurative language we saw on the last page, where Corrientes Street becomes a "valley of coins for bread", and there are "vagos con halagos de bohemia mundanal"—a phrase that's pretty much untranslatable.

The second kind of translation problem is structural. It involves deciphering verb tenses and pronouns—figuring out who is speaking to whom, who did what, and when and where things happened. A good example of this is "Bajo el Cono Azul". It's not that complicated, but Cono Azul involves action that took place in two, or maybe three, different time periods, in either two or three different places, involving three different people. We'll try to unravel it later, but for now, I'll summarize Paisaje, because it takes a minute to figure out who is speaking to whom. Then we'll look at the lyrics.

The story is about a man who had his girlfriend's portrait on the wall. When they separated, he took it down. Then sometime later, he bought a landscape painting (a paisaje), and hung it across from where her portrait used to be. In Paisaje, he's talking to his new painting, (and maybe also to her), and wondering how the autumn theme in the picture can be so much like his ex-girlfriend. At least, I think that's what's happening...

 

Alej turned on the radio this afternoon and they were interviewing Alberto Podestá. He's alive and well (85 years old), and he sounds like a very humble and sweet man. He was born in the provinces, but he said his life’s ambition was to sing tango. When he was 14 he came to Buenos Aires to start his career, and he claims the only reason he was successful is because of the help he received. He spent most of the interview deflecting attention from himself, and talking about the great musicians and poets he worked with.

Podestá became emotional when people began calling the show from everywhere, telling him how much they loved him. Someone from Brazil called and said, “I met you once in Mar del Plata, but I didn’t know who you were. Afterwards, someone said to me, do you realize you were with Podestá? I couldn’t believe it! I was with one of the giants of tango, and you never even told me who you were!”

One of the pleasures of tango is going to the milongas and rubbing elbows with people from the Golden Age. They're from a different world—they did so much, and they asked for so little.