【探戈的历史】

The history of the tango

探戈舞的历史

A sense of where you were

伴你走天涯

Tango, that “reptile from the brothels”, is making a comeback

“源自情人旅馆”的探戈舞，正卷土重来

Dec 20th 2001 | BUENOS AIRES | from the print edition of The Economist

译者：John.Wayne

TAXI-DRIVERS in Beijing have Mao Zedong as their talisman. In Buenos Aires, Jorge Malcinas has hanging from his rear-view mirror a picture of the late Osvaldo Pugliese, the great bandleader of tango. Indeed, the driver has dozens of pictures of Pugliese to bring him good luck: about the cab, his person and his house. He needs them more than most mortals do, he explains, for he lives a stone's throw from the house of Carlos Menem, Argentina's ex-president, who is widely reckoned to bring “the curse” to anyone with whom he comes into contact. Mr Menem used to be banned from attending matches of both his favourite football team, River Plate, and the national side, because of the perceived ill effects he brings.

。在布宜诺斯艾利斯，乔治.马尔希纳斯则把已故的伟大的探戈舞乐队指挥奥斯瓦尔多-普格列斯照片挂在他后视镜上。当然，他有许多能够带来好运的普格列斯照片：有关出租车的，他个人的以及住房的。乔治.马尔希纳斯解释说，他比正常人更需要这些照片，因为他住在前阿根廷总统卡洛斯.梅能住所丢弃的一块石头附近，而该总统被公认为是谁和他打交道，他就带给谁霉运那种人。梅能先生过去过去常常被禁止参加他最爱的足球队比赛，即阿根廷河床队以及其他国家队，因为他那显而易见的“霉气”。

Mr Menem himself might usefully seek to have some of Pugliese's powers rub off on him. That is what Juan Domingo Peron, Argentina's flawed if charismatic leader, did. When he returned to power in 1973, Peron begged Pugliese to forgive him for his past mistreatment of him. Pugliese used to wear his pyjamas under his tuxedo in anticipation of arrest, for—perhaps because he was a staunch communist—he liked his creature comforts in jail. Whenever he was in prison, his band would place a red carnation in a bottle on top of his unmanned piano.

梅能先生自己或许也曾裨益地找寻过一些奥斯瓦尔多-普格列斯灵气来驱除自己身上的霉气。那是Juan Domingo Peron（一个存在缺陷但魅力仍在的阿根廷领袖）所做过的。Juan Domingo Peron在1973年重新掌权后，他祈求奥斯瓦尔多-普格列斯原谅他过去对其的虐待。奥斯瓦尔多-普格列斯习惯穿着他那无尾半正式晚礼服套着的睡衣来面对监禁，也许是因为他是一个坚强的者，。无论他入狱与否，他的乐队总会在他闲置的钢琴上放置一束瓶装红色康乃馨。

On any day of the week, lovers of tango can dance to Pugliese's classic, “La yumba”, in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, New York, London, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki or Tokyo. Dozens of other cities, including Beijing, hold milongas, get-togethers at which both tangos and milongas are danced, at least once or twice a week. At these, there is always an itinerant or two—a banker in town to work on some deal, an exchange student, an actor, a mother visiting her daughter—whose passion for tango has led them, perhaps through the Internet, to this spot. No one needs, or wants, to press people on their background. At a milonga, it is enough to share this madness for tango.

在布宜诺斯艾利斯，蒙特维多，纽约，伦敦，马德里，巴黎，阿姆斯特丹，赫尔辛基或东京，每个星期的周末，探戈舞爱好者们跳着普格列斯的经典之作—“La yumba”。其他许多的城市，包括北京在内，米隆加（探戈舞的一种）与其他与米隆加混合类探戈舞，至少一周会有一到两次活动。这些活动中，总有一两位过客，如在小镇上办公事的银行家，一个交换生，一位演员，一位母亲正看望她的闺女...他们对探戈舞的激情（也许是通过网络）使他们走到了聚光灯下。没有人需要，或者想去对人们的身世背景施加压力。在米隆加探戈舞现场，能够充分地享受对探戈舞的热念。

What is tango? “A sad thought you can dance”, say some

探戈是什么？有人这么说，那是“一种能够跳出来的哀伤”

But what is tango? The commonest description—the vertical expression of a horizontal desire—is the least adequate: that applies to nearly all dances. “A sad thought you can dance”, a comment on the wall of the National Academy of Tango in Buenos Aires, is closer to the mark, though tango was not always a sad or even a nostalgic music, and can certainly be a joyful one. Besides, though Luis Alposta, a poet of tango, is surely right when he says that the tango is “the most beautiful dance in the world for couples”, he is quick to point out that tango has three elements: music and song as well as dance.

但是，到底什么是探戈呢？最普遍的描述最不恰当：纵向的（身体动作）表现你横向的渴望。这种描述几乎适用于所有舞种。“能跳舞的悲伤思绪”，这一句来自布宜诺斯艾利斯探戈舞民族学会墙壁的评价，更符合逻辑。虽然探戈舞不总是悲伤或者怀旧的音乐，也可以是欢快的调子。除此之外，尽管探戈诗人Luis Alposta对探戈的说法毋庸置疑，即“世上夫妇们最美丽的舞蹈”，他很快指出，音乐、歌曲和舞蹈是探戈的三要素。

The lyrics of tango, based on copious use of lunfardo, the port-city's hoodlum slang, have grown over the decades to create a vast, chaotic tableau of Buenos Aires life, in a language that is still topical and accessible. The music has a life of its own, too. Ever since Astor Piazzolla, the genius of Argentine music, demanded in the 1950s that people listen rather than dance, plenty of talented musicians have disdained dancers and even singers. Nestor Marconi, perhaps the finest bandoneon (concertina) player of the post-Piazzolla generation, says that before Piazzolla, “tango was a music in service to the dance; now it's a music in itself.”

探戈舞歌曲的歌词是以”lunfardo“即港口城市小混混们的口头禅为基础的，几十年来逐渐地扩大发展，通过一种仍流行且易接受的语言，造就了布宜诺斯艾利斯生活的一个辽阔而又吵杂生动的场面。探戈音乐同样地有着自己的生命。自从阿根廷天才音乐家Astor Piazzolla在50年代提倡人们只听别跳，许多有才能的音乐家们蔑视舞者甚至歌手。内斯特-马可尼，也许算是在皮亚佐拉那代以后小六角手风琴拉得最了得的演奏家了，他指出，在皮亚佐拉时代以前，探戈舞仅是为了舞蹈而服务的音乐，而如今其确是返璞归真了。

And the elements of the music? One recent afternoon in Buenos Aires, Emilio Balcarse, once one of Pugliese's chief arrangers, is putting a young tango orchestra through “La yumba”. Afterwards, he describes the composition as: “A rhythmic force that develops strikingly to the point where it dissolves into something much more soft. First, a strong sense of rhythm; then everything is much sweeter, more intimate; finally, it's back to the main theme, but with a solo, in this case the violin, inside the rhythmic structure.” That's as good a summing-up of a tango as you can get. Since Piazzolla, however, the classical harmony and counterpoint on which tango was built have been stretched to the limits, with new rhythms and instruments added to the brew.

那探戈的音乐呢？布宜诺斯艾利斯最近的一个下午，一位曾任普格列斯首席指挥家的人，Emilio Balcarse正组织着一只年轻的探戈舞管弦乐队练习“La yumba”名曲。随后，他对这部作品的撰写作出了这样的评价：“嘈嘈切切错杂弹，大珠小珠落玉盘。间关莺语花底滑，幽咽流泉水下滩。”刚开始，旋律动感十足，随后旋律变得更加悦耳亲近。最后，回到了主旋律但又有一曲独奏，小提琴琴曲揉入了旋律当中。那是你能理解探戈舞的很好的一种综述。然而，从皮亚佐拉一代以来，探戈所衍生的和谐调调以及重复旋律逐渐走到了极限，新旋律和新乐器开始酝量起来。

Unravelling the secret

解开其中的秘密

Half a century ago, Argentina's greatest writer, Jorge Luis Borges, put his finger on the problem of tango:

半个世纪前，阿根廷伟大作家Jorge Luis Borges对探戈作出了自己的见解：

The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still guards, as does all that is truthful, a secret. Dictionaries of music record its short, adequate definition, approved by all: ...[it] promises no difficulties, but the French or Spanish composer who then follows it and correctly ‘crafts' a tango is shocked to discover he has constructed something that our ears do not recognise, that our memory does not harbour, and that our bodies reject.

探戈可以被讨论，我们已经讨论的够多了，但是探戈仍保守着，似乎所做一切符合现实这样一个秘密。乐典中记录着其简短且恰如其分的定义，被大众所接受：【探戈】给人以无阻难的希望，但是某法国人或西班牙撰作家随后延续其风格并且正确地精制一曲探戈，震惊地发现他构造出了一种我们耳朵无法识辨，我们的记忆无法停留，我们的身躯无法抗拒的东西。

Borges had another insight, which he appears to have borrowed from Oscar Wilde:

Borges有过其它的见解，似乎是从奥斯卡王尔德那里引用过来的：

Music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. For myself, I confess that I cannot hear ‘El marne' or ‘Don Juan' [two tangos] without remembering in detail an apocryphal past, simultaneously stoic and orgiastic, in which I have challenged and fought, in the end to fall silently in an obscure knife-fight. Perhaps this is the tango's mission: to give Argentines the belief in a brave past, in having met the demands of honour and bravery.

音乐衬出了一个人的过去，那时候我们每个人没有意识到，这种音乐感动着我们，使我们悲叹从未经受的不幸和我们未曾犯的过错。对我自己来说，我承认我不能聆听‘El marne' 或 ‘Don Juan' （两种探戈）而不去想起过去那不足凭信的过去，那时的恬淡寡欲与放荡不羁。，最终静静地沦为了一场不公开的持刀搏斗。也许这就是探戈的使命：旨在给对勇敢的过去以信仰，满足荣誉与勇气的需要。

No two people agree about the origins of tango. The only thing about the tango that can be stated with conviction, Borges says, is that it was born in the brothels. Hence the lascivious movements, the suggestive titles—“El choclo” (the corn-cob), “El fierrazo” (the iron rod), and the way pairs of men would dance the tango on street corners, since the women of the neighbourhood were repelled by its debauchery. But Ricardo Garcia Blaya, a contemporary writer on tango, says of the brothel theory that “nothing is more absurd and incorrect.” Tango, he insists, was born in the dance halls; there, polkas and waltzes also had suggestive names.

没有两人对探戈的起源看法一致。Borges说，唯一能够对探戈令人信服的说法是，她来自情人馆。因为一些挑动情欲的举动，影射性的标题—“El choclo” （玉米棒棒），“El fierrazo” （铁杆杆），以及男人们在街角跳着探戈，被厌恶了其的放荡不羁。但是，探戈的同一时代作家Ricardo Garcia Blaya说，没有什么比“情人馆理论”更加的荒诞和错误的了。他强调，探戈出自舞厅；在那里，波尔卡舞与华尔滋同样有影射性的名号。

One dominant camp says that the tango was accepted by the upper classes of Buenos Aires only after the dance had been taken up with passion, just before the first world war, in Paris, and that the Vatican lifted a ban on the dance only after Pius X himself had been treated to a demonstration. Complete fabrications, say several modern historians. As for the word itself, some say “tango” comes from an African word, tambo, meaning a gathering place for slaves and freed blacks to dance; others say it comes from the Spanish fandango; yet others have entirely different explanations.

一个占优势的阵营方提道，探戈直到该舞蹈点燃激情后才被布宜诺斯艾利斯上层社会所接纳，就在第一次世界大战前，在巴黎，罗马教廷颁布了对探戈的禁令，直到庇护十世他自己遭到了。一些现代历史学家指出，这是一派胡言。至于对探戈这个名词的本身，有人说“探戈”来自非洲语“tambo”（路边酒馆），意思是一个奴隶们和解放的黑人们聚会跳舞的地方；其他人则说它来自西班牙“fandango”（一种西班牙舞）；还有一些人则给出了完全不同的解释。

Since everyone has a claim to know the origins of tango, The Economist will not be left out. In 1880, Buenos Aires had a population of 210,000. By 1910 that number had nearly sextupled, to 1.2m. It was to Buenos Aires that new railroads brought livestock off the vast pampas, to be slaughtered and refrigerated in the (mainly English) meat-packing plants, and then shipped out around the world. These boom-days brought European immigrants—chiefly Italians, Spaniards, French and Germans—in droves to settle on the edge of the city. (The history of Buenos Aires, Bruce Chatwin once said, lies in its telephone directory.) The fencing off of the pampas, and the mechanisation of livestock transport, brought displaced gauchos, or cowboys, to the same urban fringes. The immigrants, uprooted from their home continent, and the gauchos, uprooted in their own country, met and blended in a new town they soon embraced as their own. The music they made together managed to sing at once of a sense of loss and of a deep attachment. Nostalgia and sentimentality: two strands of tango.

鉴于每个人对探戈的起源各有说辞，TE杂志也不会排除在外。在1880年，布宜诺斯艾利斯拥有210，000人口。到了1910年，人口数量达到了接近六倍的水平，约120万正是布宜诺斯艾利斯的新铁路带离了广阔的彭巴斯草原牲畜，，然后被船装运到世界各地。这种急速发展的岁月带来了欧洲移民，主要是意大利人，西班牙人，法国人以及德国人，成群结队地定居在城市的周遭。（Bruce Chatwin曾说，布宜诺斯艾利斯的历史记录在了其的电话名录上。）彭巴斯草原被栅栏隔开着，牲畜们被机械化运输工具运输着，导致了牧人们以及牛仔们同样地陷入了城市危机中。那些在他们家园被连根拔起的移民们，那些在他们祖国被连根拔起的牧人们，他们相遇并混居在一个他们随即皈依的新镇。他们一起创作了探戈音乐，歌唱了他们曾一度的失落感，以及深深的依恋。乡愁与伤感：探戈的组合神经

Cowboys, blacks and payadores

牛仔们，黑人们和payadores

The gauchos brought with them their guitars and their musica criolla of essentially Spanish origin: haba?eras, fandangos, milongas, vidalitas and cifras. The new immigrants brought their ability to read and write music, a broader array of instruments, and Italian opera traditions. At some stage the bandoneon arrived, an impossible instrument (“a chaos”, says Mr Balcarse), with four registers and little order to its buttons. Yet, somehow, this German instrument for playing hymns was subverted into something diabolically expressive. “You can play tango without the bandoneon,” says Leopoldo Federico, one of the surviving great musicians of tango's golden era in the 1940s and 1950s, “but the history, roots and direction of tango are inconceivable without it.”

牧人们带着他们的吉他和他那有原西班牙特征的克里奥尔人：健康与美丽的好帮手？探戈舞蹈中的Eras, fandangos, milongas, vidalitas and cifras.新移民们带来了他们品阅和撰写音乐的才能，一系列更加广泛的乐器以及意大利人的传统歌剧。在其中的某一阶段，bandoneon（小六角手风琴）被引进来，这是一种不可思议的乐器（Balcarse 先生称它为“一片混乱”），它只有四个音域且音琴按键杂乱无章。然而，不知怎么地这款演奏宗教赞美诗的德国版乐器颠覆性地变成了一种魔鬼般表现力的乐器。当今幸存的探戈黄金时代（1940-1950）伟大音乐家Leopoldo Federico指出：“你们可以不用bandoneon（小六角手风琴）演奏探戈舞曲，但是探戈的历史、根源以及前进方向没有它是不可想象的。”

Today, tango is reviving again

今天，探戈重新复兴起来

Argentine blacks may also have thrown their influence into the mix with the candombe—the only Rio Plata dance that clearly has African, and even Indian, rhythms—and the milonga, a jaunty, 2/4 music which to this day is danced to add variety to a languid stream of tangos. But the black influence is hard to gauge, for few remain in the city today. Many were sent to fight in the genocidal campaigns against the Indians, in the Paraguayan war of the late 1860s and in the civil war of a decade later; others left for Montevideo, in Uruguay. Chatwin was not entirely right: today, Buenos Aires is a whiter city than almost any in Europe.

阿根廷黑人们也许已经把他们的影响力融入了candombe（一种明显拥有非洲甚至印度风格的里奥Plata舞蹈），也融入了米隆加（探戈舞的一种，2/4拍子，当今用来增加探戈舞蹈的“慵懒无力”的潮流）。但是，由于很少保留到了今天的都市，黑人对探戈的影响很难估算。很多黑人被派遣去反抗印度人灭族运动的活动中，1860年代末期的巴拉圭战争以及十年后的内战；其他人则到了乌拉圭的蒙特维多居住。Chatwin（英国旅行小说家）写的并不是完全正确：今天，布宜诺斯艾利斯这个城市比大多数其他欧洲城市的白人都要多。

Gradually the tango spread from the urban fringes, through the suburbs, to the centre of Buenos Aires. It was helped on its way by payadores—itinerant singers with barrel-organs, whose shocking notes must have wafted through the windows of more respectable, but grateful, homes—by the dance halls that sprang up, and, for those who insist, perhaps by the brothels. At the start of the first world war, tango was on its way to pushing out other popular styles of dance. Between 1903 and 1910, over 1,000 records were released in Buenos Aires, a third of them tangos. In the next decade, 5,500 records were issued, half of them tangos.

渐渐地，探戈舞曲从城市边缘蔓延开来，穿过城郊到达布宜诺斯艾利斯市中心。得到了payadores（那些带着手摇风琴，拿着雷人手记的巡回演唱者们）的帮助，探戈舞在舞厅风行起来，对于那些坚守者们大概会认为探戈来自情人馆里。第一次世界大战伊始，探戈开始挤出了其他流行风格的舞种。到了1903-1910年间，超过1,000张唱片在布宜诺斯艾利斯发行，其中三分之一来自探戈。其后的十年里，发行的5,500张唱片中探戈占了一半。

Today, tango is reviving again. “Throughout its history you hear that tango is finished,” says Daniel Melingo, one of a younger generation of tango musicians. “People talk as if it's their own youth that's over.” And that attitude, he says, is what feeds tango's nostalgia, which in turn generates new expressions of dance, music and song.

今天，探戈卷土重来一位年轻的当代探戈音乐家Daniel Melingo的说：“纵观历史你听到的是探戈沉沦的声音，人们聊着属于他们的纯真年代已不复存在，但是这种心态滋养了探戈舞曲的怀旧之情，反而激起了探戈其舞蹈，其音调以及歌曲的新鲜表达。

Adriana Varela, a powerful female vocalist of tango, says that Buenos Aires is a city that too often turns its back on the vast Rio Plata. “But whenever it turns round to face the river that shaped it, the city rediscovers everything that touches the people of Buenos Aires. My job is to take what the great poets of Buenos Aires have wrought, and to convey the landscape to which I belong.” Tango is a sense of place more than it is a set of musical rules. As Borges put it long ago:

探戈声乐界赫赫有名的Adriana Varela女士说，布宜诺斯艾利斯这个城市总是迷恋着那广阔的拉普拉塔河。“但是，无论何时回望那成形的拉普拉塔河，这个城市再次发觉布宜诺斯艾利斯的人们与之相濡以沫。我的工作在于采集布宜诺斯艾利斯伟大的诗人们曾写的作品，用来表达属于我的愿景。”探戈是一种地方归属感，胜过了一套音乐的规则正如很久之前Borges说的那样：

We might say that without the evenings and nights of Buenos Aires, a tango cannot be made, and that in heaven there awaits us Argentines the Platonic idea of the tango, its universal form.

我们可能会说，没有布宜诺斯艾利斯的白昼与黑夜，就没有探戈的存在，在天堂那端等待着我们阿根廷人的，是探戈的理想信念，她平凡的一面。

from the print edition | Christmas Specials

译注：

1.concertina [,kɔnsə'ti:nə]

n.六角形手风琴

2.criollan. 在通用西班牙语的拉美国家出生的欧裔(尤指西班牙裔)女人(或女孩)

3.fandango（方丹戈舞(西班牙或拉丁美洲的一种轻快三步舞)

a provocative Spanish courtship dance in triple time; performed by a man and a woman playing castanets）

4.tableaun. 画面；活人画；戏剧性局面；生动的场面（复数tableaux）

5.tuxedo[美国英语]

[亦作 dinner jacket](男子的)无尾晚礼服，无尾礼服，小礼服

(男子的)夜小礼服