At one point in his career, in the late 1960’s, Antônio Carlos Brasileiro Jobim (known universally as Tom Jobim) was the second most recorded artist in the world, second only to the Beatles. “But take note that there are four of them in English and only one of me in Portuguese!” he would joke. He was then, and still is, even twenty years after his death, arguably Brazil’s greatest popular composer.
Think of Rio de Janeiro, the view of the Christ statue in the distance, the bay of Copacabana, the beautiful women walking on the beach, their skin glistening under the sun. If you can feel the breeze of the ocean, you can hear the bossa nova beat that Tom Jobim and his contemporaries helped export to the world. Though somewhat out of fashion now, this genre—started in the late 1950s—helped influence jazz and pop music, and (unfortunately) became synonymous with muzak. You have certainly heard it in some office-building elevator. You might even know it as “Brazilian lounge music.”
This sophisticated style introduced a completely new way of playing the classical guitar and managed to be a pop fusion of African-inspired styles like samba with contemporary influences such as American experimentations in jazz. Musicians and lyricists leading the movement were at the very top of their game, and Jobim himself was referred to as the maestro.
Some of Jobim’s famous songs are “Girl From Ipanema” (with Vinícius de Moraes), “Wave”, “Corcovado”, “Off-Key” (with Newton Mendonça), “One Note Samba” (also with Newton). Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea performed his songs; both Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra recorded albums of Jobim compositions. In 2001, more than 200 journalists, musicians, and professionals in the music business voted to choose the best Brazilian songs of the century. Jobim had authored or co-authored seven out of the top 10 tunes and outnumbered all other composers with 32 songs on a list of 100.
As can be seen from the song titles mentioned above, much of his work (and that of his partners) found its audience in translation. Jobim himself understood the demand that his songs be sung in English. He cared about the translations and wanted them to be done well. Unfortunately, he was often unhappy with the results other songwriters came up with. He mentioned in interviews being brought close to tears by disagreements with the new versions of his compositions. He felt that, as a Brazilian, his input was overlooked, and that the Americans wished to make his work more exotic. In addition to that, he faced numerous problems with the attribution of his compositions (and the payment of royalties) to the Americans responsible for the translated versions.
It didn’t take long for him to begin to test his own capabilities in this new language. It gave him a chance to retain a modicum of control over what he and his partners created.
I have listened to most, if not all, of these songs by now—both in Portuguese and English—and they do suffer a bit more than translations should, both due to carelessness or ineptitude on the part of some translators, and due to Jobim’s non-native fluency with English. Though very able, he was not close to being completely natural in the language. After much listening, there was one song I could not help but think had lost tremendously in the process: “Águas de Março”, also known as “Waters of March”.
It may seem odd that “Waters of March” would be the song that struck me the most as being “lost in translation,” since it is also one of Jobim’s greatest successes in the English language. Written and translated by the composer in 1972 (with no help from his usual partners), the song has been used as a jingle by Coca-Cola and recorded by the likes of David Byrne, Al Jarreau, Damien Rice, and Art Garfunkel. Its most perfect version, however, is as a duet in Portuguese by the author with singer Elis Regina. “Waters of March” is the product of an older Tom Jobim, one who had already travelled the world in the wake of bossa nova’s success, heard admonitions from his doctor due to his excessive drinking, witnessed the successes of younger generations, and was feeling exhausted and uncertain about the future.
As the story goes, Jobim wrote the song in his country house, close to Rio de Janeiro. He was growing impatient with all the rain and mud that kept delaying some work he wanted done on the property and started the song as a way to distract himself from the constant downpour, creating a simple tune to go with the lyrics. His intention was to rewrite the melody later, though he soon realized that the downward spiral progression he had accidentally created fit the song—and the weather—perfectly.
The lyrics of “Águas de Março” tell of the constant rain that falls in Rio during the month of March, at the close of the summer (in the Southern Hemisphere, the seasons are opposite to those in the Northern). It is a common occurrence for excessive rain to cause floods and landslides. It washes away houses and streets, taking everything it clashes with in its current.
Though long, the song is minimalistic in its own way, as every observation by the narrator exists in itself, independent of the others. The lyrics speak of nature, bits and pieces of sticks, stones and stumps that, when brought together, unite to form a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. It is a song about cycles, nature and existence, though it differs from similar songs by stressing the bitter rather than the sweet aspects of life. The rain Jobim sings about is destructive. It ends the summer and gives way to fall, and though he mentions the “promise of life,” the listener understands that winter must come before another spring appears.
Jobim’s health at time he composed the song was not the best. His bohemian lifestyle was finally catching up with him. Naturally, his low spirits are reflected in the song. One of his musician friends, Oscar Castro-Neves, once mentioned that Jobim had claimed that his stream-of-consciousness lyrics had served as a kind of therapy, saving him money onpsychoanalysis bills.
The greatest feat of his lyrics, however, is that he managed to depictin Portuguese what ancient Asian poets used to do: the absence of time and space. “Águas de Março” exists only in the here and now. In a way, it could be read like a haiku in a new shape. It employs the Chinese language’s absence of verb tenses, stretching Portuguese as far as it can go in that direction. There is no narrator in control, the reader is a witness. All of this, which makes the poetry both universal and individual, happens in the original lyrics. Jobim manages to pull this trick by using the Portuguese with zen-like (im)precision. In his translation:
A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass, it is life, it’s the sun,
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun
Tom Jobim translated the lyrics of “Waters of March” into English himself. Though he did a credible job, I cannot help but feel that something crucial has been lost. The feel in English is more of a person making a list than writing about the cycle of nature. The loss here is great: the quality of intrinsic “being” in each phrase is lost, as is the force of repetition. The magic of the original is lost when we lose the immediacy of the lyrics. It is hard enough to explain in prose, so I can only imagine how daunting it must have been to do it in musical verse.
Much is said about the impossibility of translation, but I feel that even taking that into consideration, Jobim’s Anglophone version of his Lusophone self does not sound nearly as vital as the original. However, I’m impressed he even tried, and I salute him for what he did achieve.
What gets me, however, is that he never lets the Northern Hemisphere experience what the ‘waters of March’ meant to him—Jobim—while writing this song, bored and angered at the rain, from his country house in Rio. The English listeners are denied the core experience that originated this work of art.
Jobim does this by keeping the month of March in the title and lyrics, but changing other references. Instead of the intermittent fall of rain that heralds the end of summer and washes away everything within sight, his ’waters of March’ reference the melting snow making way for spring. The result is a Northern Hemisphere March instead of a Southern Hemisphere/Brazilian one. It’s not closing for a summer, but for a winter. So while a literal translation of the chorus would be something like:
It’s the waters of March, closing the summer
A promise of life in your heart
Jobim chooses not to mention summer in his version of the chorus:
And the river bank talks, of the waters of March,
It’s the end of the strain, the joy in your heart
And adds on a verse that sets us in a different universe:
Afloat, adrift, A flight, a wing,
A hawk, a quail, the promise of spring
I have witnessed the waters of March from the Southern Hemisphere for most of my life. “Águas de Março” makes sense. “Waters of March” does not. Let’s think of this in reverse: I also have had some experience with the Northern Hemisphere’s version of March, and know it is completely different. I remember the first cold March I ever experienced. It had been a very long and freezing winter in New York, and I was glad to see the snow finally melt. Instead of looking towards Brazilian music to echo what I felt, I remember thinking of a song I already loved, but now fully understood: George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun.”
*****
Lívia Lakomy is a Brazilian writer, translator, and musician, now based in New York City. She is working on a book of essays about Brazilian history as seen through pop culture.