Guitarra negra [English translation]

Introduction

How will I do to take you inside, guitar... How will I do for you to feel my clumsy love, my desires of sounding you fully and mine... How it is played your air flesh, your smelly tact, your hungerless heart, your silence in the bridge, your fifth string, your male and dark bass string, your singing relatives, your three souls, chatting and childish... How can one love you without pain, without hurry, without witnesses, without hands that offend you... How to move to you my well loved men and women, guitar; my alien loves, my certainty of loving you like few... How to bring you all those names and that blood, without flooding your heart with shadows, tremblings and death, ash, loneliness and anger, silence, foolish tears...

Raid

Today Death went searching for something between my books... Today's evening he went, among papers, finding out how I've been, how my life has been, how much time I lost, how I wrote when there were greengrocers who came from the country houses, when I had two girlfriends, a pretty quiff, two pairs of shoes, when there was no television, that world at the feet, violent, foolish, overwhelming, that despicable novel written by a madman... Today death went searching for my past between my books, looking for the 1940's summers, the boys under the hose, the underground sleeps, the neighborhood bananas, killed, carved in the soul... Today death went checking out my streetcar ticket, my friends, their names, the nights at the Café Montevideo, the shipments by the Onda bus with smell of stew, he went checking out my father, his Berreta, his Baldomir, checking out my mother, her hemiplegia, the Batllist Uruguay, the beloved Arístides, my dear anarchists under flag, under shroud, under wines and endless verses.. Today death went checking out the phone noises, different under the index fingers, the pictures, the thermometer, the dead and living, the pale ghosts that live within, their multiple feet and hands, their eyes and their teeth, under suspicion of subversion... And he couldn't find anything... He couldn't find Batlle, neither my father, nor my mother, nor Marx, nor Aristides, nor Lenin, nor Prince Kropotkin, nor the Uruguay nor anybody... not even the most recent dead Fernandez... He couldn't find me either... I already took a bus to Cerro and I was sitting next to life... I passed in front of a night bus and life had painted some posters... I asked for the time in a corner, and life was in the bag of the man who told me the time, with his lunch... Today I will leave open the doors and the windows of my house... and the night will get in by all the windows of my house, by all the windows of all the neighborhood, by all the windows of all the quarters and all the prisons, by all the windows of the hospitals... the night will get in with a headbutt, it will jump inside, shadow to shadow under a streetlight... and it will lay on the floor like a dog... and it will wait until the morning... Today... I will leave open the doors and the windows of my house, forever...

The house

... My heart is better placed than my house... my house, more fenced than my neighborhood... my neighborhood, fenced by my people... In my neighborhood lives the President, fenced by an almost knocked down wall...

Uruguay for export

Trembling, with the broken front by the sledge hammer, by the sledge hammer man, falls over her ribs, heavy as a world, the cow... She falls with a loud noise, flat on her face over the concrete... bleating with her melting skeleton, now are only poor big ribs, only poor leather and blood, half ton of shattered bones, pounded in all that trembling and stunned life... There she rises, like a heavy rag, caught by the leg by a hook that leaps over her, that raises her through an open hole in the bummer of a stab in complete sentimental foolishness, in the middle of half ton of monstrous pain, incomprehensible, absurd, bleating, weepy and dizzy, like a beetle that doesn't think, while it meditates slowly why it aches so much and why is aching what part of who that it's herself, the cow, open to the atrocious quartering on every corner, that never ached and that were so many parts, so broad... and that never ached while grazing...making milk, sperm, muscles, living mane and leather and antlers, that were the very life flowing towards to inside, vibrating tenderly like a warm sun towards to inside... and never ached... Now she's hanging... Her front legs straighten, harden and go towards and upwards, imploring and fatally rigid, rounded off in short hooves that a moment ago were kneading the mud of the pen, the dung of another hundred bleatings, dinosaurs of the machine's century, born to die by a sledge hammer pound... Now she's blue meat hanging in the freezer: "Uruguay for export"... That cow, that died by a sledge hammer pound, fell and the whole meat processing plant trembled... That other cow who received the sledge hammer hit in the middle of the forehead, of two fingers of thickness, while she was getting into the tube mistrusting because there was no grass there, she came to understand that there was another cow in front, bleating, that the hook was taking it... and she fell behind, also, and the concrete trembled under those bones... That other cow, who avoided the sledge hammer hit and also fell, with a broken eye and a broken leg, undone, also fell and the ground trembled, the sledge hammer trembled, the sledge hammer man trembled; the cow, died trembling of pain and fear... of a sledge hammer hit in the middle of Uruguay's "for export" forehead...

Flower show (waltz)

On the tip of the water... a white, bright, fifteen dollar flower becomes spark, gets big, dissolves, drips among other smaller flowers, cries, shakes, the water jet catapults it and rises like a ball in the air... It's always being born, while the water sings in that fountain of the boîte... Between applauses, to the beat of the orchestra, soft, white, watery flower, nostalgic in the air... rose in the applauses like tapped, cut open, impaled... moans and cries in the night, it throws stars dancing under the smoke, it reborns, cries by the white and blue jet of the fountain like it was a plant raising it -and that isn't-... and however, so it will be opening, dying, swelling and floating, while last in the night, its childish engineering beauty, its soft heart under the fixed and milky focus... the gringo, the priced water jet, the air of importing, those women, the waiter, those men...

My wings

... It's been a while I give work and I'm getting used to the disuse of my soul, to the reason of the enemy, to my sixty daily cigarettes, to the bad habits of my songs, that someway always were ours, you know it, Black Guitar... Today I resume in a comical straighten the yesterday hour stuck in its nostalgia... The wings I put on to fly make me suffer, but I scream and they raise, I moan and they make me company, I laugh and they beat on in pairs, like they were loving each other and however my two wings...hate each other, they straighten, they become my friends to take me anywhere: there is the song, here is nothingness... beyond the people and near is love... But the people is also near... and before it was there too, behind the people is the people... We've traveled through all my whims and the people was daring the floor, loving each other with wings like mine... hating their destiny, hating me and loving me without wings, with millions of feet, with hands and heads and tongues... and their thousand mouths say: "now, the die is cast..."

The butterfly

The butterfly comes to me in the street, in the damped air, by the damped air dancing, by the overwhelming, ominous air, dancing in the hot air... and I saw it wasn't me who was looking for but death... and I also saw it wasn't looking for death, because it wasn't an iron city butterfly, neither born for that... but it was just a butterfly, in the city, caught and already dead beforehand, fatally... looking in that fragile and crazy dancing for a wing, a grain, a piece of pollen in the concrete... Because the butterfly is born and doesn't learn anything until it dies on any place, deadly wounded by its fair week, by its accurate time, by its already drunk sip of life... That isn't so sad... sad is to see its chain of eggs in the soot, deposited near a river of oil, by the shadow of the great concrete walls... It's chain of silk eggs...

I am missed

I am missed... I feel that life shakes nervous if I don't appear, if I'm not there... I feel there's a place for me in the line, that they see this emptiness, that there's a missing breathing, that I disappoint a waiting... I feel the sadness or the unexpressed anger of the partner, the love of who hurt waits for me... my face is missing in the graphics of the people, my voice in the chant, in the singing, in the passion of walking, my legs in the march, my shoes leaving tracks on the dust... the eyes of mine in the morning gazing... my hands in the flag, in the hammer, in the guitar, my tongue in the language of everyone, the gesture of my face in the deep worrying of my brothers.

Appeal and intentions

How will I do to take you inside, guitar, black guitar...My brother Enrique says, that there is a certain drowned dog that licks itself steadily and licks us, licking itself, a steady wound there at the bottom, sitting in its step... And more says my brother the other Enrique, in Prague: he says that loving you with certainty, to make you fully female, to give you the life that my urgencies have, will be to love Jaime more and more ; to love him, really more... because of his soul, his own biting dog under the stick, the wire, the punch, the sack, the stand up and the insult... the forgotten cheek that neither him nor anyone put with a slap,,, but with hunger and Rita and José Luis, for Gerardo and Raúl and Rosa and Sara and Mauricio.. and for all our deads... And I have known, guitar, that this other dog you raised, barking, countryman, sometimes docile or guardian, that gnaws its own bone in the dark and growls... like almost any popular dog, it will roam by your wide streetwalks, your bleeding milongas... until dying also... maybe one day... of loneliness and anger... of tenderness... or of some violent love; doubtlessly... of love.

• Artist:Alfredo Zitarrosa
• Album:Guitarra Negra (1977)