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 19th
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 20th
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
