Category Archives: History

Pequeno vals vienes (Little Viennese Waltz)

by Federico García Lorca
(June 5, 1898 — August 19, 1936)

Rough translation by Leonard Cohen (in 1998 for a song he called Take This Waltz on the album I’m Your Man)

En Viena hay diez muchachas,
un hombro donde solloza la muerte
y un bosque de palomas disecadas.
Hay un fragmento de la mañana
en el museo de la escarcha.
Hay un salón con mil ventanas.
         ¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals con la boca cerrada.

Este vals, este vals, este vals,
de sí, de muerte y de coñac
que moja su cola en el mar.

Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero,
con la butaca y el libro muerto,
por el melancólico pasillo,
en el oscuro desván del lirio,
en nuestra cama de la luna
y en la danza que sueña la tortuga.
         ¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals de quebrada cintura.

En Viena hay cuatro espejos
donde juegan tu boca y los ecos.
Hay una muerte para piano
que pinta de azul a los muchachos.
Hay mendigos por los tejados,
hay frescas guirnaldas de llanto.
         ¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals que se muere en mis brazos.

Porque te quiero, te quiero, amor mío,
en el desván donde juegan los niños,
soñando viejas luces de Hungría
por los rumores de la tarde tibia,
viendo ovejas y lirios de nieve
por el silencio oscuro de tu frente.
         ¡Ay, ay, ay, ay!
Toma este vals del "Te quiero siempre".

En Viena bailaré contigo
con un disfraz que tenga
cabeza de río.
¡Mira qué orillas tengo de jacintos!
Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas,
mi alma en fotografías y azucenas,
y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar
quiero, amor mío, amor mío, dejar,
violín y sepulcro, las cintas del vals.
Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women
There's a shoulder where death comes to cry.
There's a lobby with nine hundred windows.
There's a tree where the doves go to die.
There's a piece that was torn from the morning,
and it hangs in the Gallery of Frost --
        Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.

I want you, I want you, I want you
on a chair with a dead magazine.

In the cave at the tip of the lily,
in some hallway where love's never been.
On a bed where the moon has been sweating,
in a cry filled with footsteps and sand --
        Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take its broken waist in your hand.

This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
with its very own breath
of brandy and death,
dragging its tail in the sea.

There's a concert hall in Vienna
where your mouth had a thousand reviews.
There's a bar where the boys have stopped talking,
they've been sentenced to death by the blues.
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
with a garland of freshly cut tears?
        Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
take this waltz, it's been dying for years.

There's an attic where children are playing,
where I've got to lie down with you soon,
in a dream of Hungarian lanterns,
in the mist of some sweet afternoon.
And I'll see what you've chained to your sorrow,
all your sheep and your lilies of snow --
        Ay, ay, ay, ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
with its "I'll never forget you, you know!"

And I'll dance with you in Vienna,
I'll be wearing a river's disguise.
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
my mouth on the dew of your thighs.
And I'll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
with the photographs there, and the moss.
And I'll yield to the flood of your beauty,
my cheap violin and my cross.
And you'll carry me down on your dancing
to the pools that you lift on your wrist --
O my love, O my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz,
it's yours now. It's all that there is.


Are there popular bands today that would write a song like Spanish Bombs and mention a poet who was tortured and then murdered by a right-wing militia for his support of modernity in poetry, politics and morals? His only crime was to be outspoken about values that were not shared by a conservative and heavily armed group fighting for control of his country.

I remember mulling over Clash lyrics while in grad school with some folks who were working for Paul Preston. How places of great tragedy have turned into lazy drinking at a “disco casino” for British tourists.

The lyrics led me to Lorca’s poems and thus to a deeper understanding of life and civil war in 1930s Spain. It still gives me chills to listen and read about this period in time in Europe, not just because of social consciousness about incredible brutality against civilians but because of the sad similarity to world events unfolding even today. The Wikipedia explains the fundamental rift that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead and that devastated the Spanish economy for decades:

During and in the wake of the war, the Nationalists carried out a program of mass killing of opponents where house searches were carried out, and unwanted individuals were often jailed or killed. Trade-unionists, known republican sympathisers and critics of Franco’s regime were among the first to be targeted. The Nationalists also carried out aerial bombings of civilian areas with the help of the German and Italian air forces.

[…]

Republican sympathizers proclaimed it as a struggle between “tyranny and democracy”, or “fascism and liberty”, and many young, committed reformers and revolutionaries joined the International Brigades, which thought saving the Spanish Republic was the front line of the war against fascism. Franco’s supporters, however, especially the younger members of the officer corps, viewed it as a battle between the red hordes of communism and anarchism on the one hand and “Christian civilization” on the other.

Poland cracks down on ex-Soviet spies

The BBC reports:

The Polish parliament has approved a bill designed to remove people who collaborated with the communist secret services from public life.

The bill could lead to the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of people working in business, the media and government.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if they were removed and then came back under a fake ID, or would they give up the fake one and come back with their real ID…?

FWIW, I originally posted this on Schneier’s blog.

Poems for Mandela

The BBC has a nice story about poems written for Nelson Mandela and a book called Halala Madiba to celebrate his 88th birthday (next Tuesday). Apparently it’s hard to get but it includes almost 100 poems with authors including Seamus Heaney, Wole Soyinka, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wally Mongane Serote, Jeremy Cronin, Tupac Shakur, Andrew Motion, Ntozake Shange, Dennis Brutus and Breyten Breyenbach.

I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, it reminds me that I should find some more LKJ. His albums are awesome and I always loved his poem in Creole called “Englan is a Bitch”:

    ‘W’en mi jus’ come to Landan town
    Mi use to work pa di andahgroun
    Y’u don’t get fi know your way aroun”

Happy Birthday Mr. Mandela!

Identity loopholes

The Boston Globe highlighted a DHS report that says loopholes are being exploited in the US special visa program:

The probe found numerous instances in which groups in the United States falsely claimed to be churches, and visa applicants lied about their religious vocations in order to get into the country . More than a third of the visas examined by investigators were based on fraudulent information.

Whoa. That’s a high-rate of failure but it reminds me of the visas given to Russians to escape religious persecution in the 1980s. I actually met a woman many years ago who confided she practiced Judaism because her family claimed it as their religion in order to emmigrate to the US. They continued practicing after they lived in America out of fear of being deported. Ironic, considering that the US enforced strict quotas that blocked Jews immigrating to the US during the pogroms. The Center for Immigration Studies points out how much the immigration policy has changed:

Until the Refugee Act of 1980, the United States’ definition of a refugee mostly involved persons fleeing Communist regimes. The definition since 1980 stipulated that a refugee is any person who is outside his/her country “and who is unable or unwilling to return … because of persecution, or a well-founded fear of persecution, on account of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Therefore, after 1980, Soviet emigres had to prove to an immigration officer in Rome that they had a well founded fear of persecution. Most managed to do so. Until the late 1980s, United States policy accepted all Soviet Jews as refugees.

Identity is definitely an odd thing since you never know who will define it for you and for what. Hmmm, that almost sounds like something Heidegger might say. Scary. Does the need for a democratic state to close loopholes in identity management outweigh a person’s right to control their destiny?

Homeland Security auditors who reviewed an application for a 33-year-old Pakistani man, for example, could not locate the alleged religious group listed on the petition as his sponsor, and when investigators went to the group’s address they found an apartment complex.

Perhaps we should ask whether a religious group these days would want to be discovered by federal investigators? It’s like that old Far Side cartoon where men dressed in animal pelts and carrying TVs run away from the window to their hut yelling “Quick! The Anthropologists are coming!” Also, given the history of religion in the early US (not to mention the true definition of the word “church”), is it so unusual for a modest home to be a place of practice? Is a mega-stadium of worshippers a more legitimate identity to carry than a small family gathering?