Specie of the Dark Nº2 (Again)

A brighter version, to try some brighter appreciation of something darker.



This tango, my fellow reader, oh, this tango... Oh, the high piece of art it is, oh my, so big, so high. This poem --where the parallelism of a lifetime as a (theatre) play in drunkenness, coming from a poetic character sinking his pain of love in alcohol- have immense appreciation here in Argentina. I don't know if it's needed to be argentinian to fully appreciate it, but here's a translation that don't make justice to the amazing treatment of the language on the original, and down below there's a gadget to play it.

My heart, bandoneon, is hurt
by your maliciously groaning curse.
Your tears of rum take me
to the deep underworld
where the mud is in upheaval.

I know, don't tell me! You are right!
Life is an absurd wound,
and it is all so fleeting
that it is a drunkenness, my confession,
nothing more!

Tell me of my sentence,
tell me your failure,
don't you see the pain that has wounded me?
And speak simply to me
about that absent love
in search of a fragment of oblivion.
I know that it harms me!
I know that I hurt you
crying my wine sermon.
But it's the old love
that trembles, bandoneon,
and searches in a liquor that stuns
the drunkenness, that at the end
finishes the show,
drawing a curtain over the heart.

A little bit of remembrance and nausea
is dripping with your slow moan.
Your liquor dizzies and prods
the little heard on the left of the chest
with the strain of the last drunkenness.
Close the window;
the sun burns
its slow snail of sleep.
Don't you see that I come from a land
of oblivion, forever gray,
behind the alcohol?...

Cátulo Castillo, "The last drunkenness" (La última curda, Argentinian tango).
A. Troilo orchestra, R. Goyeneche singing; click to play: