The stirring tango “Soledad” features in the 1934 film El Tango en Broadway (directed by Louis J. Gasnier), a movie shot in New York, starring Carlos Gardel and scripted by lyricist Alfredo Le Pera.
Unlike many tangos before and after, the imagery of this song seems unbound by place. The style is “international,” the details and atmosphere, comfortably modern. The lonely speaker could be situated anywhere in the world, and one can almost sense that there’s a train station nearby. As in “Volver,” written the same year for a different movie, the melodic line is as long as boiler smoke streaming out on the wind. The song leans heavily on imagery of the clock, phasing its tick into imaginary footsteps outside, and later into the nightmarish vision of the expired hours, looking down with their grimace of mockery (a recurring theme in Le Pera’s work).
Perhaps because they were cast so indelibly onto the silver screen, few of the tangos authored by Gardel and Le Pera have entered the dance band repertoire. But many of them have become standards of the songbook, cherished by tango singers and musicians alike, and “Soledad” stands particularly high among these. It is a Gardel song with that rare distinction of not being overplayed, and it retains a certain freshness while perfectly evoking the cinema and the style of the 1930s.
Loneliness
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Carlos Gardel (in El Tango en Broadway)
I don’t want anyone to come and tell me
That from your life of sweetness
you’ve rooted me right out…
I need a lie, so that my heart keeps beating
And awaits your call that never comes, devout.
I don’t want anyone to think about me
In my bitter depths of loneliness
enduring round the clock…
The hours passing, the minute hand a-grinding
The purgatory of its slowing tick-tock…
Within the grieving shadow
of my room where I await
Her footsteps that perhaps, will not return,
I seem to sense them nearing
sometimes, just to hesitate,
Yet never daring once to bring in her.
But no one’s out there, and she isn’t coming,
It’s just a fantasy created by my hopes…
And once the vision vanishes,
there’s nothing to be known
But ashes in my heart alone.
Upon the silver dial of the clock,
The hours that expire
refuse to go and die…
They file all around like foreign figures
And look upon me with mocking eye.
Their caravan’s extending to forever
And sinks away in darkness,
each grinning like a ghost…
And bearing with them, her smile that was mine once,
To leave me nothing but the hurt of my woes.
Soledad (1934)
Music: Carlos Gardel
Lyrics: Alfredo Le Pera
Yo no quiero que nadie a mí me diga
Que de tu dulce vida
vos ya me has arrancao,
Mi corazón una mentira pide
Para esperar tu imposible llamado.
Yo no quiero que nadie se imagine
Cómo es de amarga y honda
mi eterna soledad,
Pasan las horas y el minutero muele
La pesadilla de su lento tic-tac…
En la doliente sombra
de mi cuarto al esperar
Sus pasos que quizá, no volverán,
A veces me parece
que ellos detienen su andar
Sin atreverse luego a entrar.
Pero no hay nadie y ella no viene
Es un fantasma que crea mi ilusión,
Y que al desvanecerse
va dejando su visión
Cenizas en mi corazón.
En la plateada esfera del reloj
Las horas que agonizan,
se niegan a pasar,
Hay un desfile de extrañas figuras
Que me contemplan con burlón mirar.
Es una caravana interminable
Que se hunde en el olvido
con su mueca espectral,
Se va con ella su boca que era mía
Sólo me queda la angustia de mi mal.