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I am reposting these poems I found.
both found in the CD Astor Piazolla: El Tango conducted by Gidon Kremer
The song’s in Italian, the poem is in Spanish. I’ll just put down the English translations provided.
Preludio para el año 3001 (Rinascero)
By Angela Denia Tarenzi after original Spanish text by Horacio Ferrer
Translated by Robert Cowart
You should really hear the song- so forceful and strong and stirring and wow.
I shall be reborn a fine evening,
With this desire to love and to live stronger still
I’ll be reborn (it is destiny) in the year 3001,
My lovely city will be a festival of color.
The stray dogs will bark at my shadow…
With my modest baggage I’ll arrive from the Great Beyond
And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea
I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.
A vagabond, a clown, and a magician will come;
My immortal comrades, shouting “Courage…arise.
“That’s the way! Take heart, be born! Courage, brother,
‘For the work of death and rebirth is beautiful but hard.”
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
And an unearthly voice will give to me
The great and pure faith that will serve me…
I shall return…again I shall believe…and struggle!
I’ll wear a red flower in my button-hold
And I shall be reborn whether anyone else ever has!
My country- 30th century- you will see:
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
I shall be revorn from the things I have loved so deeply…
When the shadows of the house say softly “He is here!”
I shall kiss the memory of your quiet eyes,
To complete the poem I left half-done.
I shall be reborn from the fruit of a village market
And the grimy ambience of a romantic café,
From the ruined village that crumbled in an earthquake
And from the rage of the Southern people, I shall be born.
You see, I’ll be born in the year 3001
And with the people who never were, but will be then;
We will bless the earth, our earth…and I swear to you
That this country shall come into being once again
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
And an unearthly voice shall give to me
My country…30th century…you will see…
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
- - -
El Tango, by Jorge Luis Borges
Translation by Anthony Kerrigan
“Where are they now?” elegies ask
About those who are no longer, as if there were
A region where Yesterday could be
Today, the Still and Not Yet.
Where (I echo) can that malevolence be,
The malignity founded in dusty dirt
Lanes or in lost towns,
By the sect of defiance and the knife?
Where are they now, those who passed on,
Leaving an episode to Epic
A fable to Time, men who knifed each other
Without hate or lucre or passion in love?
I look for them in legend, in the final
Ember that like a vague rose
Holds something of that brave crew,
Of men named Corrales or Balvanera.
What obscure alleyways or wasteland
Of heaven is darkened by the hard
Shad of the men who was shadow,
Muraña, that Knife of Palermo?
Where the deadly Ibarra (may the saints
Forgive him!) who killed his brother
On a railroad overpass, because the other’s
Dead were more, and thus he evened the score?
A mythology of knife thrusts
Slowly dying in oblivion
A chanson de geste lost
In sordid police reports
There is another ember, another burning rose
In the ash that keeps them whole:
And these the haughty knifers live on
And the silent dagger’s bulk.
Though the facitious dagger or that other dagger,
Time, sink them into the mire,
Today, beyond time and misshapen
Death, these dead men live on in the tango.
They are in the music, in the strings
Of an obstinate and elaborate guitar,
Which weaves a fiesta and the innocence
Of courage into a fortuitous milonga.
The yellow carousel of horse and lion
Whirls in the hollow while I hear the echo
Of those tangos of Arolas and Greco
I watched danced on the pavement
Or an instant that today stands out alone,
Without before or after, against oblivion,
And has the taste of everything lost,
Everything lost and recovered.
There is nostalgia in every chord:
The other patio and the half-seen vine,
(The South, behind suspicious walls,
Keeps a knife and a guitar.)
This burst of sound, the tango, this
Wantoness defies the routine years:
Made of time and dust, man lasts
Less long than the libidinous melody,
Which is only time. The tango spawns a turbid
Unread past in certain measure true:
An impossible recollection of having died
Fighting, on some corner of a suburb.
Here's audio of Caetano Veloso reading the poem in its original Spanish.
both found in the CD Astor Piazolla: El Tango conducted by Gidon Kremer
The song’s in Italian, the poem is in Spanish. I’ll just put down the English translations provided.
Preludio para el año 3001 (Rinascero)
By Angela Denia Tarenzi after original Spanish text by Horacio Ferrer
Translated by Robert Cowart
You should really hear the song- so forceful and strong and stirring and wow.
I shall be reborn a fine evening,
With this desire to love and to live stronger still
I’ll be reborn (it is destiny) in the year 3001,
My lovely city will be a festival of color.
The stray dogs will bark at my shadow…
With my modest baggage I’ll arrive from the Great Beyond
And kneeling at the edge of the transparent sea
I shall shape for myself a new heart from salt and mud.
A vagabond, a clown, and a magician will come;
My immortal comrades, shouting “Courage…arise.
“That’s the way! Take heart, be born! Courage, brother,
‘For the work of death and rebirth is beautiful but hard.”
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
And an unearthly voice will give to me
The great and pure faith that will serve me…
I shall return…again I shall believe…and struggle!
I’ll wear a red flower in my button-hold
And I shall be reborn whether anyone else ever has!
My country- 30th century- you will see:
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
I shall be revorn from the things I have loved so deeply…
When the shadows of the house say softly “He is here!”
I shall kiss the memory of your quiet eyes,
To complete the poem I left half-done.
I shall be reborn from the fruit of a village market
And the grimy ambience of a romantic café,
From the ruined village that crumbled in an earthquake
And from the rage of the Southern people, I shall be born.
You see, I’ll be born in the year 3001
And with the people who never were, but will be then;
We will bless the earth, our earth…and I swear to you
That this country shall come into being once again
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
And an unearthly voice shall give to me
My country…30th century…you will see…
I shall be reborn! Reborn! Reborn!
- - -
El Tango, by Jorge Luis Borges
Translation by Anthony Kerrigan
“Where are they now?” elegies ask
About those who are no longer, as if there were
A region where Yesterday could be
Today, the Still and Not Yet.
Where (I echo) can that malevolence be,
The malignity founded in dusty dirt
Lanes or in lost towns,
By the sect of defiance and the knife?
Where are they now, those who passed on,
Leaving an episode to Epic
A fable to Time, men who knifed each other
Without hate or lucre or passion in love?
I look for them in legend, in the final
Ember that like a vague rose
Holds something of that brave crew,
Of men named Corrales or Balvanera.
What obscure alleyways or wasteland
Of heaven is darkened by the hard
Shad of the men who was shadow,
Muraña, that Knife of Palermo?
Where the deadly Ibarra (may the saints
Forgive him!) who killed his brother
On a railroad overpass, because the other’s
Dead were more, and thus he evened the score?
A mythology of knife thrusts
Slowly dying in oblivion
A chanson de geste lost
In sordid police reports
There is another ember, another burning rose
In the ash that keeps them whole:
And these the haughty knifers live on
And the silent dagger’s bulk.
Though the facitious dagger or that other dagger,
Time, sink them into the mire,
Today, beyond time and misshapen
Death, these dead men live on in the tango.
They are in the music, in the strings
Of an obstinate and elaborate guitar,
Which weaves a fiesta and the innocence
Of courage into a fortuitous milonga.
The yellow carousel of horse and lion
Whirls in the hollow while I hear the echo
Of those tangos of Arolas and Greco
I watched danced on the pavement
Or an instant that today stands out alone,
Without before or after, against oblivion,
And has the taste of everything lost,
Everything lost and recovered.
There is nostalgia in every chord:
The other patio and the half-seen vine,
(The South, behind suspicious walls,
Keeps a knife and a guitar.)
This burst of sound, the tango, this
Wantoness defies the routine years:
Made of time and dust, man lasts
Less long than the libidinous melody,
Which is only time. The tango spawns a turbid
Unread past in certain measure true:
An impossible recollection of having died
Fighting, on some corner of a suburb.
Here's audio of Caetano Veloso reading the poem in its original Spanish.
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