Upd. Dec. 27, replaced the video that was taken down with a working one.
In continuation to my infatuation with bossa nova (as I already showed by posting Aguas de Março earlier this month), I'd like to put forth another beautiful melody out of the 1960s.
Mati Kaspi and Yehudit Ravitz covered it as a part of Kaspi's 1977 "Beautiful Tropic Land" (Eretz Tropit Yafa) project, which included highly artistic renditions in Hebrew of famous Latin American songs.
Edited Nov. 15th to speak about Leah Goldberg's attitude to writing 'classical' poems. -Yours truly
Edited Nov. 20th - modified one line of the translation, which appeared lame to me. -Yours truly
Leah Goldberg, herself a modernist and a literary critic, was extremely conscious to the fact that classical poetic forms were falling out of fashion. So she asserted stylistic justification for many of her poems by claiming they are replicas or derivatives from "genuine" classical works.
Goldberg herself translated a considerable number of classical works; however she wrote yet more of her own. In my opinion, they are wonderfully authentic and display formidable mastery of the language.
Poem II from the cycle "Love Poems from an Ancient Tome" (circa 1944) is a lovely sample -
ולא היה ביננו אלא זוהר עניו של השכמה ברחוב כפרי ולבלובו של גן בטרם פרי בלובן תפרחתו יפת התואר.
ומה מאוד צחקת באמרי כי אל השחר הענוג כורד אקרב ואקטפנו למזכרת ואשמרנו בין דפי ספרי.
את זרועך נשאת, התזכור? והנידות אט ענף תפוח, ועל ראשי ירד מטר צחור.
מאחורי גבך הכפר ניעור, החלונות נצטלצלו עם רוח - ולא היה בינינו אלא אור.
To X., who reminded me that true, selfless, friendship is not an extinct species.
And there was between us just the shining The modest shining of a village dawn, A garden's blossom ere the fruit have shown, In its new bright and fair flower binding,
And then you laughed so hard when I intoned, That I'll approach the heavens' rosy sweetness, And pick it up, and fold it lest it slips us, And store it midst the pages of my tome
Do you recall - you raised your arm so high - And then you slowly stirred the apple trusses, And rain fell on me - of perfect white,
Behind your back, the street wore off the night; And morning wind has rung the window-glasses, And there was between us just the light.
Translated by yours truly.
The poem was set to music by Danny Litany in a lovely bluesy way, and sung by Tsila Dagan. Here is a much later performance by Danny Litany himself (as in most cases, I hold that Leah Goldberg sounded better when performed by a female singer).
I shall mention today a wonderful Brazilian song called Águas de Março, or Waters of March. Two English translations (one of them by Jobim himself) may be found here (also from this link - the song has been recently voted by a committee of Brazilian musicians as "the best Brazilian song".
In Brazil, March is a rainy month at the end of autumn (for us, sordid northern-hemispheriacs, it corresponds to September). The song is written in a stream-of-consciousness technique.
The Hebrew lyrics may be found here. The translator was Eli Mohar, and the performers - Gidi Gov and Mika Karni for Gov's TV program "Layla Gov" (probably at the end of the 1990s)
והגשם יבוא וישטוף כל כאב הבטחה של חיים, השמחה שבלב
And the rain will come, washing out all the pain, With the promise of life, and heart's joy again
An inferior (but freely-available-via-YouTube) version was recorded by Ninet Tayeb and Ran Danker:
And a recording in Portuguese by Elis Regina and Tom Jobim -
Natan Alterman, one of Israel's first great poets, wrote abundantly, combining at the same time high literary work with poetic commentary on contemporary life, and with considerably more down-to-earth lyrics to popular songs. All three rôles won him acclaim during his lifetime (a theme on which I might elaborate in the future).
The song I will bring here is called the "Harmonica Song", "Zemer Ha-mafukhit" (זמר המפוחית). Lyrics in Hebrew are available at this link. It is written as a dialogue between a man (who is by connotation a sailor) and his beloved. The man is drunk and tired of himself, "but not of wine - but because of some rag-tag Miriam".
I like Alterman's sharp metaphor (as well as the fact that he put it in the lyrics of a song intended to be popular) —
האהבה היא תוך-תוכו של התפוח אבל בנישואין לוקחים את הקליפה
Love is the very flesh that makes the apple, But getting married is all about its skin
So Alterman's hero will marry his Miriam, but he will leave her to sail away, only to think of her at sea. This is very much Alterman's ideal of being in love, found in many of his works - passionate, hopeless, alienated seemingly out of choice, but in essence - due to his hero's inherent inability to stay in one place.
The song (like many of Alterman's) was set to music by Sasha Argov. The original performance was recorded in the 1960s by Edna Goren and Kobi Recht. Mati Kaspi subsequently recorded a version in which he sang all the lyrics - in my opinion it loses the vital dynamic of the dialogue. I would like to conclude with a recent performance by the original performers, with a nice jazzy accompaniment:
