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Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Cantes flamencos

What are actual flamenco lyrics like from the 19th century.

Here's one on page 154 of the Austral edition of Cantes flamencos y cantares:

Maresita mía
¡qué güena gitana!
De un peasito e pan que tenía
la mitá me daba.

[Madrecita mía / qué buena gitana / de un pedacito de pan que tenía / la mitad me daba]

[My little mother / what a good gypsy / if she had a piece of bread / she would give me half]

Or this one:

"No soy de esta tierra / ni en eya [ella] nasí [nací]; la fortuniya [fortunilla], roando, roando [rodando] / m'ha [me ha] traío [traído] hasta aquí."

[I'm not from this land / nor was I born here; / fortune, turning, turning, brought me here.].

They are quite wonderful.  Flamencology is a hornet's nest I don't want to open, but some of these have the quality noted by some as the pristine spare beauty of the medieval Spanish popular song.  In some cases, you don't even find a metaphor, just a bald statement or an artful hyperbole.  "My eyes wen to the sea / for water to cry / but there wasn't enough there / so they had to come back."

Let's note that you can write it out like this:

No soy de esta tierra
ni en ella nací:
la fortunilla, rodando, rodando,
me ha traído hasta aquí.

and you will get almost the same text, as long as you pronounce it in Latin American Spanish where ll and y and c and s have the same pronunciation. In this sense, the dialect spelling is needlessly exoticizing. I don't understanding writing biene for viene either.  

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