Milongas
144
Milongas
144eBook
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Overview
From tango’s origins in the gritty bars of Buenos Aires, to milongas tucked away in the crypt of a London Church, a café in Kraków, or the quays of the Seine, Cozarinsky guides us through a shape-shifting dance’s phantasmagoric past.
In neighborhood dance halls vibrant and alive through the early hours of the morning, where young and old, foreign and native, novice and master come together to traverse borders, demographics, and social mores, “it is impossible to distinguish the dance from the dancer.”
As conspiratorial as he is candid, Cozarinsky shares the secrets and culture of this timeless dance with us through glimmering anecdote, to celebrate its traditions, evolution, and the devotees who give it life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781953861115 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2021 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 144 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Translator Bio: Valerie Miles is an American writer, editor and translator, and lives in Barcelona. In 2003, she co-founded Granta en español. She writes and reviews for the New York Times, the Paris Review, La Nación, La Vanguardia and el ABC, among others. She translates from the Spanish and Catalan and is a professor in the postgraduate program for literary translation at Pompeu Fabra University.
Read an Excerpt
Preface
Apparently (but etymologies are unreliable) the word “milonga”
derives from an African word meaning “word.” Jorge Luis Borges, in
an early text, attributed the birth of the milonga and the tango to
the arrival of African slaves: “the habanera mother of the tango, the
candombe...” Since in its remote beginnings the milonga was sung,
the singing of words, an adjunct to the music, became the name
by which the milonga was known. Popular singers, “payadores,”
played milongas on the guitar, to which later, at social gatherings,
the violin, the flute, and the piano were added. And yet, in the same
way that the word “scribe” in ancient Mesopotamia concealed the
fact that the main power of the scribe was not to write but to read,
to decipher the messages preserved on the clay tablet, the name
“milonga” concealed the fact that the milonga was above all not
words but music.
Perhaps because music precedes words, or does not require them
in order to exist, the succession of notes lends itself readily as a
symbol of the emotional state of its listener or performer. Nothing
in a certain beat, a certain rhythm, a certain tune carries an explicit
emotive label: as in Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, the emotion in the
milonga lies in the performance or in the reception of that performance,
as the taste and color of an apple is in the tongue that tastes
it and the eye that sees it.
A word or an image belong to a given vocabulary. Music adapts
itself to the context given to it and acquires in the process a specific
identity: melancholy, stirring, quarrelsome, sensuous. The tango,
especially for a “porteño,” for a native of Buenos Aires, can be all
those things at once. The milonga, a term that can be used for the
tango that is not merely played or sung but danced, is above all
sensuous, even lascivious, certainly erotic. The tango can be naïve or
mawkish; the milonga is never innocent. On the contrary, it is (in
the eye and ear of the beholder) alluring, sexual, magnetic, suggesting
an undercurrent of danger and possibly violence. “This book’s
title is Milongas and not Tangos,” Cozarinsky sternly states. “Its focus
is on the dance, not the music.” Music translated into movement,
channeled through movement outside the verbal realm. Style is,
according to Cozarinsky, the inescapable essence of milonga. “If we
define style as the individual response of one body to the sound of
the music,” he says, “then that style will express itself and continue
being refined until it grows splendid in some cases, merely correct
in others, or else remains dull. In milonga, the dance and the dancer
are indistinguishable from the very first step.”
Cozarinsky traces the milonga (and in its wake, the tango)
throughout
the twentieth century and across several continents.
He finds milongas danced in Kraków, London, Moscow, New York,
Tokyo, and discovers that the movements of the dance can be
learned and brilliantly performed by unexpected people, from the
couple that danced for the censorious Pope Pius X to that archetypal
Latin lover, Rudolfo Valentino, in The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse; from the belle époque icons Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ida
Rubinstein to the chauvinistic French President Raymond Poincaré
and his wife. Cozarinsky is not a distant observer: he is an
experienced practitioner of the art, a well-known figure in the popular
joints in which milonga is danced today in Buenos Aires. His
essay has something of an autobiographical confession.
Unlike other dances, especially those born in the twentieth
century, in the milonga youth and physical beauty are not weighty
qualities. The dancers can be old and stout, short or tall: nothing
matters except the skill with which their body conjures up or
follows a style. If the dancers don’t follow the adamant rules of
style, they are not dancing milonga. Traditionally, men and women
fulfilled different roles in the dance; today, same-sex couples dancing
a milonga have to agree on who is playing one role or the other.
Jack Lemmon in drag, with a rose between the teeth, stumbles
around the dance floor in the arms of Joe E. Brown who has to
correct Lemmon’s style: “Daphne, you’re leading again.”
National identities are imaginary constructs and yet, because
of certain emotions associated with certain nationalities, music
can acquire a kind of passport that assigns it to a particular country.
Country or city: milonga is the music of Buenos Aires, not
Argentina; it is “porteño,” endemic to Buenos Aires, and becomes
Argentinian only because Buenos Aires is the metonym for the
nation. It is commonplace to say that the sound of a milonga makes
a porteño weep with nostalgia. Cozarinsky makes it clear that the
milonga is above all an existential condition, an ineffable, impassioned
state of being.
Alberto Manguel
Lisbon, May 13 2021
Table of Contents
Preface ix
The First Move 3
Ceremonies of the Present
Salón Canning: Transfiguration 9
The Flaneur: Roaming 14
Music From a Lost Time: Necromancy 24
Nameless Milonga: Resurrection 32
Taking Minutes of Bygone Times
Anno Mirabilis 1913 43
Unfaithful Memories 52
Dubious Testimonies 59
1914 and Afterwards 66
"That Brothel Reptile" 75
Clandestine Tango 88
Odi et amo 100
Piringundines 110