Corrientes y Esmeralda
(The corner of Corrientes and Esmeralda)
Tango 1933
Music: Francisco Pracánico
Lyrics: Celedonio Flores
Recorded 17 October 1944 by the típica Osvaldo Pugliese with vocal by Roberto Chanel.
English-language text version and subtitled video by Michael Krugman. All Rights Reserved.
[Photo: Tango Time Machine Archives]
Our bilingual, subtitled video of Corrientes y Esmeralda is below, followed face-to-face text in Spanish and English with explanatory notes. There are still a few poetic ambiguities, but every decent song has some of those! Still, let's call this version a work in progress....
As always, I hope this version will enhance your enjoyment of the song as you listen and as you dance...
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Amainaron guapos junto a tus ochavas |
Tough guys retreated to your corners* |
* Tough guys: guapos. The guapo was a respected figure of the arrabal, a kind of local dandy, knife fighter, enforcer, and election fixer known for his strict code of moral behavior. Though we have translated it here as the more general expression "tough guy," the guapo played a much more specific role in the arrabal. A neighborhood might have any number of tough guys, but it could only have one guapo.
* corners: ochavas. The ubiquitous eight-sided, angled street corners of Buenos Aires.
* Rich kid... cross: A 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.
* craps and monte, baccarat and lottery pools: craps (dice) and baccarat were high-class games usually played in a casino; monte and lottery pools were of the people.
* 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 tangos, the Royal Pigall: Royal Pigall was a famous café located at Corrientes 825, where Roberto Firpo, Francisco Canaro, Eduardo Arolas and other tango greats performed. It was directly across the street from the Teatro Odeon at a time when the street was considerably narrower than it is today. 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 comedy 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 is syntactically ambiguous. The irony is that the lowbrow Royal Pigall is bouncing (or ricocheting, or rebounding) tangos off the highbrow Odeón theatre (which makes like the Royal Academy). Or it may be the other way round.
* 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.
* like Montparnasse when evening comes: Montparnasse se viene al caer la oración. Literally, "Montparnasse comes with the falling of the evening prayer." Montparnasse is 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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