Corrientes y Esmeralda
(Corrientes and Esmeralda)
Tango 1933
Music: Francisco Pracánico
Lyrics: Celedonio Flores
English-language version by Michael Krugman. All Rights Reserved.
[Illus: Odeon Theatre, Buenos Aires]
Michael Lavocah gives a brilliant prose summary and analysis of this song in his new book, Tango Masters: Osvaldo Pugliese. I highly recommend it! I did the English-language version that appears below a while back, but never got around to publishing it. I'll make a subtitled version of it soon. For the time being, here are some un-subtitled videos of the songs:
Pugliese/Chanel, 17 October 1944
Lomuto/Diaz, 5 August 1934 D'Arienzo/Echagüe, 4 May 1945
Piazzola/Fiorentino, 19 May 1945
Lacava/Vargas, 23 April 1954
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Amainaron guapos junto a tus ochavas |
The local punks retreated to your corners* |
* Local punks: Guapos. The term guapo is used loosely here, to denote a local tough or hoodlum, colloquially a punk, whereas the true guapo of an earlier epoch was something very different.
* corners: ochavas. The ubiquitous eight-sided, angled street corners of Buenos Aires.
* Rich kid... cross: A fanciful reference to the Argentine engineer and aviator Jorge Newbery, also a champion boxer, swordsman, and kung-fu fighter who lived a few blocks from the fabled street corner, on the Calle Florida. With his advanced pugilistic skills, he was not averse to mixing it up with opponents of all social strata. (Sources: Rodolfo Adelio Raffino, El Jorge Newbery de Salliqueló, p. 13; Also, "El 'cajetilla' que calzaba de cross o los guapos porteños," La Nación, 26 September 2010.)
* Brash youth-gangs: patotas bravas. Patotas were loosely knit gangs of upper-class youth, often violent, usually with a right-wing political orientation. They acted as provocateurs and troublemakers, sometimes in opposition to gatherings of the popular, democratic Union Civil Radical, sometimes out of naked, unprovoked, youthful aggression.
*Sugar-cane booze...gin fizz: The word caña may denote a variety of cheap alcoholic beverages including beer, grappa, and especially a cheap liquor distilled from sugar-cane, generally consumed by the working class. Gin fizz was a more sophisticated concoction favored by urban sophisticates.
* coke-sniffing hookers: locas de pris. Loca (literally, a crazy woman) is a euphemism for a loose woman or prostitute. De pris, from the French meaning “having a stuffy nose,” is a slang expression for a person who sniffs cocaine.
* “Odeón”... Royal Academy: The Odeón theater (previously Eden, then Variedades), built 1891 on the corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda, was part of a complex that included also the Hotel Roi and the Royal Keller restaurant, the latter a well-known literary haunt. Famous performers on the Odeón’s stage included Leopoldo Lugones, Jean Juarés, Anatole France, Eleonora Duse, and other luminaries of Argentine and world theater.
Among those luminaries was the Spanish classical actress María Guerrero (1867-1928) who with her husband, Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, the Marquess of San Mamés, had resettled in Buenos Aires in 1897. So pleased was the actress with her reception in her adopted country that she and her husband devoted a considerable part of their personal fortune to the construction of the Teatro Nacional Cervantes, built in the Spanish Baroque style, and named after Spain’s emblematic novelist and dramatist. Among the benefactors of the project were the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII. The theater opened in 1921 and is still active at its original site on the Avenida Córdoba.
The Real Academia Española (Spanish Royal Academy) was and is the official organization responsible for preserving and regulating the Spanish language. While the "Odeón" theatre is not known to have enjoyed any direct participation by the Academy, the presence on its stage of a highly-regarded Spanish classical actress, coupled with the favor shown her by a reigning Spanish monarch, may have engendered this fanciful association between the theater and the Royal Academy itself.
The use of the verb mandarse is ambiguous. It is probably a variation of the popular expression mandarse la parte, meaning "to feign, pretend, or imitate." Hence, the "Odeón" imitates or pretends to be The Royal Academy.
* Bouncing....Royal Pigall: Royal Pigall was a famous café located at Corrientes 825, where Roberto Firpo, Francisco Canaro, Eduardo Arolas and other tango greats performed. History tells us that early tangos were including in the musical repertoire of the incipient national theatre of Argentina, and were a frequent musical accompaniment to the sainete, a one-act theatrical genre whose national character stood in contradistinction to the predominant classical Spanish repertoire. (See José Gobello, Breve Crítica Historia del Tango, p. 25, Corregidor, 1999).
The phrase itself is syntactically ambiguous. The irony seems to be that the lowbrow Royal Pigall is bouncing (or skipping, or ricocheting) tangos off the highbrow Odeón theatre (which makes like the Royal Academy).
* streetcar to the arrabal. The arrabales were the poor quarters at the city limits, inhabited primarily by immigrants living in group housing with poor sanitation. The image is of a malnourished resident of the arrabal who has stayed out late gambling, lost everything, and who now waits for a streetcar that will take him home.
* when evening comes: al caer la oración. Literally, "at the falling of the evening prayer."
* Montparnasse: The classic bohemian crossroads of Paris centered at the intersection of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, home of artists and intellectuals, dandyism, prostitution, and all the other trappings of bohemianism.
* Carlos de la Púa: Argentine poet, journalist and cineaste, b. Carlos Raúl Muñoz y Pérez (1898-1950), best known for his collection of Lunfardo poems La Crencha Engrasada ("The Greased Part").
* Pascual Contursi: Argentine poet, lyricist, and playwright (1888-1932) best known as the lyricist of Mi Noche Triste, an early tango-canción (1913) whose baleful lyrics set tango on a new emotional trajectory and prompted Jorge Luis Borges to deride the post-Contursi tango as "the effeminate whinging of jilted pimps."
* nobody: cacatúa, literally a cockatiel (a small, parrot-like bird native to Australia). The word is used to denote an inferior, mediocre, or merely ordinary person. There is an implied comparison between the harsh squawking of a cockatiel and the sweet sound of the voice of Carlos Gardel, "El Zorzal" (thrush).
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