The close ties between literature and music in Latin America

The close ties between literature and music in Latin America. 

      Art is and remains as art, notwithstanding the boundaries our limited understanding gives to its different expressions. It can easily go through this frontiers back and forth, and artists happen to express others art -translating it- into their own, that's why Catacombae, Baba Yaga and the Door of Kiev went transformed from paintings by Hartmann to songs by Mussorgsky; that's why the impressionist movement gathered painters and musicians. Different arts may dwell, undetachable, on a same mind, as paint and poetry in the Orientals, like Xu Wei. In other instances, art impresses an artist in such a manner, that it impulses a statement of deep acknowledgement, like in Revuelta's Homenaje a García Lorca, beyond life and beyond words.

     In Latin America, with our endemic illiteracy (claimed exceptions are Cuba, Venezuela and the 19^th century Paraguay), literature may not be the art of the people, but it has found a way through and into music, the spirit you really find in the streets, in the province, in fiesta and in mourning. We have an imperious need for rhythm. That's how our most important writers, such as Guillén, Benedetti, Neruda, García-Márquez, Pacheco, Cortázar, Galeano, Azuela and Storni among others, have inspired composers and musicians from salsa to rock, from Puerto Rico to Chile.

     Caribbean mulato poetry by Nicolás Guillén is so rhythmic that its transformation into music was just obvious; Sóngoro cosongo, a poem published in 1931, became a salsa major hit when Hector Lavoe made a brassy and sabrosa rendition within Fania Records. Pablo Milanés, countryman to Guillén, recorded Canción, also known as de qué callada manera, a very tropical love poem, which was played by Sonora Ponceña, in a very boricua flavored salsa arrangement by Papo Lucca.

      Toca madera, a poem by Uruguay's beloved Benedetti was recorded by Willie Colón, “el malo del bronx”, who arranged Joan Manuel Serrat's version of the poem into salsa, which lyrics approach superstition in the controlled modern world where we live.

      Las venas abiertas de América Latina, the book that Hugo Chávez gave as a present to Barack Obama, by Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, inspired a homonym song from Argentina's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, which combines a Santana kind latin rhythm with heavy metal and ska. The lyrics recall the devastating gold and silver rushes that Las venas documents among other injustices, and it seeks to awake the conscious of Latin Americans, repeating despierta aborigen throughout the song.

      The debut album of Café Tacuba, the whimsical Mexican folk music-Latin-rock band, included Las batallas, a song inspired by Las batallas en el desierto, the short novel written by José Emilio Pacheco. The book depicts a story of a kid who falls in love with a mature woman, in the mid 20^th century Mexico City. Literature and music fall in a recursive relation within this case, since the first lines of Pedro Flores bolero Obsesión, are repeated all throughout the novel, as a written soundtrack... por alto que esté el cielo en el mundo.

      Los de abajo (translated as The underdogs) was the first novel about the Mexican revolution to gain worldwide attraction. Author Mariano Azuela made a full portrait of the life of a revolutionary group. The book denounces the little gains that the pueblo really got from the overall outcome of the fight. Its title was taken to name the most prominent Ska group from Mexico: Los de abajo, whose lyrics often protest against the inequalities of the Mexican regime, in consistency with the book that gave them name.

      Juan Luis Guerra studied some years of literature in college, before entering musical studies at Berklee College of Music in Boston. His lyrics are inhabited by beautiful and powerful metaphors, inspired by the astonishing beauty of the Dominican province, by the complexity of city life, the history of his country and, above all, the improbable features of love. His songs often borrow lines from writers, such as in Burbujas de amor, inspired by a fragment from Cortázar's Rayuela and Bachata rosa, which first verse borrowed from Neruda.

     Argentinian-Swiss poetess Alfonsina Storni's fate, poetical as her life, inspired Alfonsina y el mar, a emotional ballad by Félix Luna and Ariel Ramírez, sung by many of Latin Americas most transcending female voices, like Mercedes Sosa, Shakira and Tania Libertad.
     Pedro Aznar, the Argentinian rock-folk singer, recorded a complete album of 11 musicalized poems by Jorge Luis Borges, songs include Buenos Aires, Insomnio, Caja de Música and El Gaucho.

     Cien años de soledad, the masterpiece of Laureate writer Gabriel García Márquez, was as well represented in a song, called by the name of the mythical place where the novel occurs: Macondo, a cumbia-porro recorded by folk-protest artist Óscar Chávez and Dominican-Venezuelan Billo's Caracas Boys, among others.
     To get their work into music, Poets have taken the lead, in front of essayists and novelists. Aguamarina and Yo no lo sé de cierto are the most famous of the many poems Jaime Sabines wrote to be put into music; Eugenia Leon's versions of these were very popular among Mexican non-mainstreamers.  

     As Jorge Luis Borges would say, omissions are the first thing that is noticed in an anthology, and there are ought to be found many in the present, which only stands as a minimal token of how art inspires art in the new continent.
    Pictures: Holton Collegiate Trombone, #364620

The close ties between literature and music in Latin America por Elio Lagunes se encuentra bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-CompartirIgual 3.0 Unported.