July 25, 2006
An interesting Borges appreciation
Frank Ridgeway sent this in. I'm little late in posting it, and I hope the link stays up for a while.
A brief but interesting article on the anniversary of Borges's death.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/14895289.htm
Posted by joegrohens at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2006
Book: The Tango Singer
The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez trans Anne McLean
Dancing to the rhythms of a violent history
By Amanda Hopkinson
Published: 10 February 2006
Madonna performed it in Evita. Sally Potter directed it in The Tango Lesson. Hundreds, mainly women of uncertain age, dance it across British cities. And the Argentines, who claim to have choreographed it - although the roots lie in the male partnerships of Cuban sailors improvising on the rhythms of the habañera - have written about it. Even Borges's brief "History of the Tango" opens by paying homage to the many histories that precede his. And British visitors to La Boca (the port where tango emerged) write glamorous accounts of their encounters.
Tomas Eloy Martinez takes a less glamorous approach. The novelist is interested in tango's myth and mystique, related through the lyrics rather than the movements of this lament that balances on a knife-edge between consummate control and intense passion. As with The Peron Novel and Santa Evita, The Tango Singer is about the Buenos Aires of his youth, before a right-wing bomb ousted Martinez from his newspaper and brought exile in the US.
The eponymous singer is Julio Martel, discovered by a North American PhD student during a chance conversation with the cultural historian Jean Franco. Again, this mingling of actual and fictitious protagonists belongs to a Latin American genre of "meta-historical fiction".
Bruno Cadogan's quest for Martel leads him to Buenos Aires, where he is led to the house that was the original site of Borges' kabbalistic tale, "The Aleph". From there he pursues Martel across the city, attempting to divine the connections between the odd occasions when the crippled singer makes erratic appearances and sings in a strange voice between a tenor and a falsetto. Martel refused to record: the only way to hear him is to see him, although an early fairground recording precipitates a national furore.
Martel's repertoire includes laments from the earliest and lewdest period of immigration to the city, in the late 19th century. But the year now is 2001, when the Argentine economy collapsed. Graphic descriptions abound of a city under siege by the migratory poor, camped on the streets, desperately attempting to find food or beg a living - a city of ragged shadows and bonfires on corners, of a political structure in crisis. The city that Martel maps out for Cadogan is an even bleaker one, superimposed on an even blacker past. It is this recent history that Cadogan explores through a variety of subplots.
The Tango Singer delivers on every Buenos Aires myth, but goes well beyond the familiar. This is the city in which ghostly legends - Peron, Evita, Borges, Gardel - haunt everyday reality. It is also where the secrets of a recent past cannot be contained. The legend of the charismatic singer "with sunshine in his throat", vocalising the "long roll of thunder" unleashed under Peronism and military dictatorship, gives a sharper, more urgent voice to the tango. From being merely a sexy and exportable dance craze, it translates as the popular history of a nation in violent change.
Amanda Hopkinson is director of the British Centre for Literary Translation at UEA
Posted by joegrohens at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
November 17, 2005
New Book - "Tango: The Art History of Love"
(click to enlarge)
Reviews
"Thompson performs a fascinating dissection of tango, picking apart its history with an enthusiast's passion and a scholar's authority. Pulling references from poetry, painting, and most potently from African dance, he shows us tango as an ecstatic manifestation of life's emotional dynamics and inflames us with his reverence for the form."
—Mikhail Baryshnikov
“Robert Thompson’s Tango indeed is an aesthetic history of that dance of heterosexual passion. The book has gusto, and its own deep song of eloquent erotic ecstasy and sorrow. It will inform readers until they are wild with all regret.”
—Harold Bloom
"I was startled to find how interesting this subject can be. What a fine book."
—Norman Mailer
“In language no doubt inspired by the lyrics of its subject, this serious volume examines and celebrates the cultural history of the famed Argentine dance, conveying its real passion and the author’s passion for it. Thompson, the renowned Yale Africanist and art historian, convincingly evokes the often-obscured African roots of the dance, whose name comes from the Ki-Kongo word for ‘moving in time to a beat’.… Hollywood versions of the dance pale once Thompson beings to mine the riches of tango’s rhythms, lyrics, philosophy and steps…for fans of dance, music and cultural history, this is the real deal.”
—CPublishers Weekly (starred review)
Publisher's Description
In this generously illustrated book, world-renowned art historian Robert Farris Thompson gives us the definitive account of tango, “the fabulous dance of the past hundred years—and the most beautiful, in the opinion of Martha Graham.”
From its syncretic evolution in the nineteenth century—partaking of European, Andalusian-Gaucho, and, unbeknownst to many, African influences—to its representations by Hollywood and dramatizations in dance halls throughout the world, Thompson shows us tango not only as brilliant choreography but also as text, music, art, and philosophy of life.
As he did in his classic Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, Thompson, in this book, “takes his subject in the round, not in any specialized or compartmentalized manner. He is part anthropologist, part art critic, part musicologist, part student of religion and philosophy, and entirely an enthusiastic partisan of what he writes about” (The New York Times).
Passionately argued; unparalleled in its research, its synthesis, and its depth of understanding; and written with revelatory clarity, Tango: The Art History of Love is a monumental achievement.
About the Author
(
Robert Farris Thompson is a world-renowned Yale art historian and author of the now-classic Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. He is also the author of, among other works, Black Gods and Kings and African Art in Motion. He has been a Ford Foundation Fellow and has mounted major exhibitions of African art at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. He is Col. John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, where he is also Master of Timothy Dwight College. He lives in New Haven.
TANGO: The Art History of Love
By Robert Farris Thompson
Pantheon Books
September 20, 2005 / $28.50
ISBN: 0-375-40931-9
www.pantheonbooks.com
- New York Public Radio Broadcast, October 29, 2005
- Wisconsin Public Radio Broadcast, December 10, 2005
- Afropop Worldwide interview, New Haven 2005(print, Ned Sublette interviewer)
Posted by joegrohens at 09:24 AM | Comments (0)
July 26, 2005
Tango Pain (By Indigo Frank)
If you must get an injury or more
let it be of the tanguero cause
For it is better to be burned by the rope
of this sentimental cause
than by those easily overlooked
elements (but impure)
Confound yourself with a compound of
hurting yourself worse with a castigada, if you are fit
So later, from the dark bed, you may not watch the
comedic resolutions, the lost vals,
and bite your tongue hard,
so you have further excuse not to refuse an alluvious dance.
Cortinas like platelets will clear the floor, only in your mind,
rest, young sore.
Being-a...beginner?
Caminata en la orilla del mundo
Your bruised toes and traversed psyche are media vuelta
The worst accident was to rush that song!
For those of you who intend your hurt, quebradas on the bottomless floor, keep breaking for all a basic step might do:
what hurts you may also heal you, with its milonguera cause, for:
Is it about persistence?
Nada, no comprendo, they are alternatives.
To learn to move counterclockwise, to isolate the hips
down, not completely unlike a chilled belly dancer,
to bear shame, and sweat the unspeakable...and yet to learn to walk!
Alternatives, tango nicked and tango talked.
To dance at even the mistake a gate would notice, for some milonga sacrifice,
some open embrace.
Posted by indigo at 07:02 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2005
Reviews of Borges
A collection of reviews of Borges's works and of works about Borges.
Posted by joegrohens at 01:14 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2005
Origins of Tango (Borges)
Tobias's blog quotes an excerpt from Borges.
Each of the meticulous researchers Vincente Rossi, Carlos Vega and Carlos Muzzio Sáenz Peña explains the origins of tango differently. I hereby agree not only with all their findings, but with each and every other finding as well. According to the regularly propagated cinema version, tango was born in the suburbs, in the tenements (usually in the Riachuelo delta zone because this quarter is so photogenic for the cinema) and was at first rejected by the patriciate. Not to be outdone by Paris, however, it opened its doors around 1910 to an interesting bunch of suburbians. Although this fairy tale of the "pauper prince" has been dubbed unquestionably true in the meantime, none of my memories (I just turned fifty) back it up by any means. Nor do any of the inquiries I have made.
Read the rest on Tobias Ph. E. Romer: Origins of Tango
(As the previous link seems now defunct, I have copied the rest of Borges's text below (via Google cache))
Each of the meticulous researchers Vincente Rossi, Carlos Vega and Carlos Muzzio Sáenz Peña explains the origins of tango differently. I hereby agree not only with all their findings, but with each and every other finding as well. According to the regularly propagated cinema version, tango was born in the suburbs, in the tenements (usually in the Riachuelo delta zone because this quarter is so photogenic for the cinema) and was at first rejected by the patriciate. Not to be outdone by Paris, however, it opened its doors around 1910 to an interesting bunch of suburbians. Although this fairy tale of the "pauper prince" has been dubbed unquestionably true in the meantime, none of my memories (I just turned fifty) back it up by any means. Nor do any of the inquiries I have made.
I have discussed this matter with José Saborido, the author of Filicia and La morocha, with Ernesto Poncio, who wrote Don Juan, with the brothers of Vicente Greco, the author of La viruta and La tablada, with Nicolas Paredes, one-time Caudillo in Palermo, and with a Gaucho singer friend of his. I simply let them talk, and took good care not to ask any questions presuming any particular answers. When they were asked about the origins of tango, they gave widely varying replies both with regard to topography and geography: Saborido (who comes from Uruguay) relocated the cradle of tango in Montevideo; Poncio (born in the Retiro quarter) voted for his own part of Buenos Aires; the south city dwellers laid claim to the Calle Chile; and those from the north were certain that tango first emerged among the prostitutes in Calle del Templo or Calle Junín.
Despite all these different versions – which could doubtless be extended by asking people from La Plata or Rosario – my advisors all agree on one important point: tango started in the brothels. (And they also agree when: not much before 1880 or after 1890). This is confirmed by the cost of the musical instruments first used: piano, flute, violin, and later bandoneon. Accordingly, tango could not have originated in the outer suburbs because there they made do with six guitar strings. And there is plenty of other evidence as well: the lascivious dance figures, the clearly suggestive titles in many cases (El choclo [the corn cob], El fierrazo [the fire poker]), plus what I observed first as a child in Palermo and some years later in La Chacarita and Boedo: men dancing together at the street corners because their women refused to take part in anything so slatternly. Evaristo Cariego described this very well in his "Heretic Masses":
Out on the streets, the good people pour out
Their friendliest obscenities,
When to the tango rhythm La morocha
Appear two orilleros with lithe and lissom cortes.
Elsewhere Carriego describes with an excess of oppressive details a wretchedly poor wedding feast where two roisterers have to quieten down the bridegroom, whose brother is in jail. But despite all the suspicion and mistrust, rancour and mean jokes:This brusque and severe man, whom we can picture clearly from the two verses, illustrated very well the people's first reaction to tango – as a "brothel snake" in Leopoldo Lugones' laconic words. After being found less offensive and thus more socially acceptable in Paris, it took many years for tango to penetrate the tenements in the northern part of the city – and for all I know it may not have succeeded even now. Formerly, tango was orgiastic devilry, and now it is a way of walking.
The bride's uncle, who thinks
he'd better make sure the dancing
stays clean, insists, almost offended,
that cortes are not even allowed as a joke...
"Modesty aside, they'd better
not try that... we'll see indeed.
We are poor, admittedly:
but whatever you do, do it with decency."
[Jorge Luis Borges, quoted from the text collection Kabbala and Tango, Fischer Taschenbuchverlag 1991]
Posted by joegrohens at 03:20 AM
January 29, 2005
Fiction: The Dancing Detective
The Dancing Detective (www.tangomascarada.com) is a tango murder mystery in English, French, Spanish, Greek and German. With illustrations and soundtrack. (Requires Flash player.)
Succinct and campy, the language imitates the trite hard-boiled American detective fiction of the '30s and '40s. Wolf weaves tango into the text with fetishized fragments -- his detective finds splinters from CDs of rare Tango music at the crime scene, a woman's "plunging neckline" is a metonym of the underlying kinky eroticism of this story's perverse tango underworld. All surface, little depth, a pastiche of clichés - it gives a smell of tango that seems simultaneously true and false.
"My God," he said, "the killer walked her to the cross and crucified her." He didn't know who it was, but Damien recognized the steps; the killer was a tango dancer.
Comparing the different translations from the English yields some interesting nuances. The translators seem to have their own individual styles, and some vernacular slang comes through. I discovered that "dancing detective" is "boeuf qui danse" in French.
And I think the crucifixion line I quoted above has more of a ring to it (more assonance, more end rhyme) in Spanish:
Dios mío” se dijo, “el asesino la llevó hasta el cruce y la crucificó”.
The story was first published in the New York magazine ReporTango in March
2003. The author, Victor Levant, is a Gestalt Psychotherapist, PhD. In International Relations
and a tango dancer in Montreal, Canada.
Posted by joegrohens at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)
January 10, 2005
Comparison of Tango Poets with French Symbolistes
The link between Verlaine and the tango poets is shown in Canto de ausencia, a poem wrote by Homero Manzi:
Escrito en un poema está tu nombre.
Colgada en la pared tu cara buena.
Tus cartas escondidas en un cofre,
y en un libro de Verlaine, tus azucenas…
Posted by joegrohens at 03:58 AM | Comments (0)