The MiraculousNovember 2023Music
51. Early 20th Century, Tucumán, Argentina
Word count: 169
Paragraphs: 3
“When I was a boy at school,” recalls an elderly musician who has written nearly a thousand songs and performed them on stages throughout the world, “on the first days of winter we went out to the playground, in the sunlight, and sang Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse, on y danse.” Growing up in northern Argentina, he didn’t understand French, knew nothing of Avignon, and, indeed, hadn’t the remotest idea of what France was. He had never even been to Buenos Aires! A few years later, when he has learned more geography, he wonders why there is no song about the tree he sees every day walking to and from school. Much later he writes some simple songs in Spanish for children to sing as rounds, as he had done with Sur le pont d’Avignon, in the hope that they will recognize in these tunes their own world, their own Latin American reality.
(Atahualpa Yupanqui, b. Héctor Roberto Chavero Aramburu)
Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.