This blog has been featuring quite a lot of strong and dramatic lyrics and I repeat, tango is not for the faint of heart. However, there’s also an abundant amount of cheerful, funny and derisive material to be found. A quite amusing element in tango is, as far as I am concerned, the combination of lively music and sad or sarcastic lyrics, which tends to happen a lot. On the other hand, there are also a few tangos that combine a sad melody and happy lyrics, and today I will give an example of that.

In my view, Jorge Ortiz has one of the most gloomy and desperate voices in the whole genre and he is rather famous among modern-day dancers because his tracks with Biagi are very popular. However, he has also done a couple of songs with Miguel Caló, which tend to sound much more dramatic than those with Raúl Berón. Therefore, it may come as a surprise to some that the following song is actually very cheerful (OK – while ignoring the sad overtone for a moment). By the way, I think this poem has an unique kind of flow, there is something very smooth about it, like an express train among tango lyrics.

I have been working on quite a lot of Troilo translations during the last few months and I realize my selection has been a bit biased towards Alberto Marino. However, my interest in Francisco Fiorentino is in no way less serious. I generally prefer to dance to his early songs with Troilo but there is also a lot of great later material that are supposedly being overlooked dramatically. I have decided to translate one of the most curious titles in his repertoire and I hope you’ll enjoy some of the, in my opinion, very poetic elements in this lyric. I advise you to use my translation to take a look at the structure of the Spanish words in this tango, worth mentioning are excerpts like ”en mi vida oscura – como una pura – copa de alcohol” and ”mis sueños se derrumban – sobre la tumba – de esta pasión”.