The translator’s job is always tricky, but translating poetry and lyrics can be downright devilish. Poets and lyricists choose words not only for their meanings, but also their sounds. When two languages (like English and Spanish) have very different syllable structures and rhythms, we get caught in a conundrum: attempts to stick too closely to the meanings of individual words can lose the music of the whole, but attempts to capture the overall rhythm and flow can distort the message the original words attempt to convey. Translating poetry and lyrics, then, always puts the translator on a tightrope.

I can’t go through each tango line by line and justify my word choices, but with one (rather extreme) example I hope to share with you some of the processes that go into all my translations.

Here is a line in the vals “A Magaldi” that sounds beautifully mellifluous in Spanish:

La flor del dolor se deshoja, sembrando congojas en mi corazón.

This vals, by the minor lyricist Juan Tiggi, are an elegy to the late tango singer Agustín Magaldi. Most of the vals is replete with standard, almost cliché images—a winter’s morning, weeping and lamentations, a mention of Gardel—but this line is a gem. Listen to it above, spoken in Spanish (recited to the best of my ability by yours truly). Even divorced from the orchestra and melody, this line is musical, beautiful.

Now, Google’s automated translating program renders it as “The flower of pain is defoliated, sowing grief in my heart.”

Ugly, ugly, ugly. Word for word, the translation is accurate, but it captures none of the music of the Spanish original. So can we create a pleasant-sounding rendition of this line in English? 

First things first: what makes the line sound beautiful in Spanish? For one thing, the vowel sound /o/ is repeated nine times in twenty syllables—almost half of the syllables in the sentence! Careful readers may also notice that most of the syllables containing other vowels are what linguists call “function words,” short words that act as the grammatical and syntactic glue of the sentence: la, del, se, en, mi. (the, of the, reflexive marker, in, my). The words that carry the brunt of actual content and meaning in this sentence are dominated by /o/ sounds. Now, Spanish has only 5 vowel sounds (not counting diphthongs), whereas most dialects of English have around 20, so statistically it will be harder to keep that quantity of assonance in English. But we can try to hint at it. 

Next: single, elegant verbs in one language may have no direct one-word translation in another, requiring instead unwieldy phrases and circumlocutions. In Spanish, Tiggi uses the verb deshojar which refers either to the action of tearing petals off a flower, (a favorite pastime of lovesick rural schoolgirls), or tearing the pages out of a book. We have no such word in English, except the stuffy Latinism “defoliate” which sounds too much like “exfoliate,” a word that you most often find on overpriced skincare products. Also, in Spanish, deshojar, while uncommon in everyday usage, doesn’t sound particularly pedantic—the average Spanish speaker may encounter many hojas on a normal day: an hoja can be a sheet of paper, a leaf, or a petal. But there are few English speakers who run into “folios” on a daily basis, and “foliage” is the particular jargon of landscapers and gardeners.

I could coin a new word, like “depetal,” but the goal is to render both meaning and sound, and “depetal” rattles unpleasantly in the ears. And I have another problem: in Spanish, the verb is reflexive and therefore passive; the flower of pain causes its own petals to fall off. There is no simple way of expressing this reflexivity in English; Google’s program uses passive voice: “The flower of pain is defoliated.”  But la flor del dolor se deshoja is a much more active sentence, as it is clearly the flower that tears itself apart. But “the flower of pain tears itself apart” is entirely too cumbersome. I might as well say “the flower of pain self-defoliates,” but that creates an ugly image through dissonant sounds, and that word, “defoliate” is still too pretentious, too bookish. Lacking any way to express this idea directly, I would choose to say “Petals fall from the flower of pain.” Here, at least, we have a simple action expressed in plain English. 

On to the second clause of the sentence: sembrando congojas en mi corazón, “sowing grief in my heart.” Sembrar does mean “to sow,” which is a good word in English, simple and specific, and even Google got that one right (I’m glad it didn’t choose “disseminate,” which would have been just terrible). And there is no English word that has the force of the Spanish word congojas. Congojas are intense feelings of anguish and sadness, and out of the myriad of possible glosses Google gives us “grief.” Not awful, but I prefer the word “woe,” which has the same vowel sound as “sow.” though the meaning is slightly different. So now I have “sowing woes in my heart.” A bit of the lovely assonance in the Spanish original comes through…just a bit. Can we swap out the word “heart” for a more assonant one? How about “soul”—that has the same vowel sound as “sow” and “woe” (at least in my particular American English accent).

So now we’ve got “Petals fall from the flower of pain, sowing woes in my soul.” That could still sound better in English. Many tangos use the word “flor,” which literally is “flower,” but we could try “bloom,” which only has one syllable. And “pain,” while accurate, does not flow into the phrase like “sorrow” would. The two words are not exactly equivalent, but again, they are related concepts.

So: “Petals fall from the bloom of sorrow.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Is there any way to bring more of the vowel in “woe” and “sow?” Going back to deshojarse, we could use the word “torn,” which has a similar vowel sound. So, “Petals are torn from the bloom of sorrow, sowing woes in my heart.” But there’s that passive voice again: “Petals are torn.” What if I just eliminate that unnecessary “are”—it’s not really contributing any new information to the sentence anyway, it’s the verbal equivalent of empty calories. Then, to make the verb agree, I can eliminate another unnecessary syllable: the “ing” in “sowing.”

And so, the final product of my translation and tinkering:
“Petals torn from the bloom of sorrow sow woes in my soul.“
This is different from the Spanish original. We don’t get the sense in English (as we do in Spanish) that the bloom or flower actively self-destructs. And this translation implies that the petals actively aim to sow woes, while in the original the implication is that the sowing of woes is rather an unintended side effect of the flower’s suicide.

You could always go with the AI translation “The flower of pain self-defoliates, sowing grief in my heart,” if you want to be literal. I feel that my line captures the entire mood just a tad bit better. “Petals torn from the bloom of sorrow sow woes in my soul.“