I, Jake Spatz, do solemnly attest that the translations presented here were done by me, usually in haste, often without consulting a native speaker, and solely because there's a bunch of very nice people who like it when I read one in the middle of a dance on Wednesday nights.

As is frequently the case with popular song lyrics, especially those written before the advent of Xerox, the original texts here are in varying states of disorder. Arrangers often dropped entire stanzas to keep songs around the three-minute mark; singers occasionally flubbed a line, or altered the wording to their tastes; songs (or sections thereof) were sometimes rewritten entirely by the bandleaders; some tunes have multiple sets of lyrics, bearing little resemblance to one another; and, finally, the original sheet music—customarily regarded as an authentic textual source, for no apparent reason (sheet music was obviously not proofread very thoroughly)—sometimes contains its own brand of errors.

These tango lyrics, in short, can be a total mess even before I get to them.

What you see here is a provisional gathering of texts, without much editorial redaction. I have sometimes changed a word to match what I hear in the recordings; I have added some punctuation, and changed the poems' lineation on occasion; and I have corrected obvious mistakes whenever I've remembered to. This preliminary treatment has been neither confident nor consistent. For now, I translate as fast as I can, as well as I can, and recite a lyric a week.

I also take requests, so if there's a particular song you'd like me to wreck, please let me know in person or by email, and I'll get to it when I can. (Please, however, refrain from telling me which kind of songs not to translate, unless you've got a list of ten good songs that can keep me busy for the next two months.)

My profuse thanks to those who have answered questions for me, or otherwise clarified matters, to help me do a better job. If you enjoy the work I've been doing with these lyrics, please thank DJ Yulia Kriskovets for building the intermission into her spin cycle, and Murat Erdemsel for making it a part of his milonga in the first place.