I
Toward the end of 1966, Violeta finished recording an LP whose name announced the appearance of fourteen compositions: they were “las últimas,” “the last” in the sense of “the most recent” in her process of poetic and musical production, but they would also be the last of her career, as a few months later, in February of 1967, she decided to take her own life.
This album condenses and expands, all at once, a life of felicitous expressive pursuits and achievements, nourished by the intense relationship that Violeta wove with Chile’s popular traditions—the poetry and music of the peasants of the north and south; songs dedicated to the human and the sacred, the age-old Mapuche tradition—which, on her travels, she extended to include the cultures and art forms she found along the way.
The fourteen compositions of this crowning work lay out a sensitive route that brings together every dimension of the “universe of Violeta Parra,” from her luminous and celebratory gratitude to the dark depths of a soul that navigated lovesickness, resentment, greed, and injustice. They do so by means of a broad range of aesthetic possibilities in which forms soaked up from poetic tradition and popular culture are renewed and breathe with an intensely personal shine, with the stamp of an unmistakable individual character, which is uniquely Violeta’s—and which belongs to us all.
Their blend of wisdom, tenderness, volcanic rage, social and historical consciousness, humor and irony, desperation, doubt, bitterness, “joyfulness and sorrow,” is embodied in varied rhythms, meters, and registers. In Violeta’s work, Biblical references go hand in hand with popular sayings; the highest lyrical flights of a verse can be followed by an anecdote picaresque or crude in its everyday truth. The journey we experience as we listen to Las últimas composiciones is the journey of life itself, in all its keys.
II
The LP, released by RCA Victor and ranked by the Chilean edition of Rolling Stone as the best Chilean album of all time, opens with Violeta’s most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” which became widely known through the cover by Mercedes Sosa, and was likewise recorded by (the incomparable) Cecilia, Joan Báez, Elis Regina, Chavela Vargas, and Omara Portuondo, among many other artists. Now, countless versions of the same song exist in other languages.
The six five-line stanzas that make up this song/anthem have a meter that is unusual in the Spanish-language tradition, the twelve-syllable verse:
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto,
me dio dos luceros que cuando los abro,
perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco
y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado,
y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo.
[Thank you to life, that has given me so much:
it gave me two bright stars, and when I open them
I can perfectly distinguish white from black
and in the high heavens, their starry depths
and among the multitudes, the man I love.]
(tr. Manuel Verdecia)
Also rare is the choice of the assonant “a-o” rhyme, which repeats in each and every one of the song’s verses. But, when we hear the cadence, distribution, and pauses that Violeta employs as she sings it, we notice a subtle kinship with a form that gives the text a new dimension: the lullaby, hexasyllabic and rhyming every other line:
Gracias a la vida
que me ha dado tanto
me ha dado el oído,
que en todo su ancho
graba noche y día
grillos y canarios
martillos, turbinas,
ladridos, chubascos
y la voz tan tierna
de mi bien amado.
[Thank you to life,
that has given me so much:
it has given me my hearing,
that in all its breadth
records night and day,
crickets and canaries,
hammers, turbines,
howls, and torrential rains,
and the tender voice
of my beloved.]
After writing the lullabies and rounds of Ternura, Gabriela Mistral emphasized the genre’s archetypical dimension: “The nursery rhyme is the diurnal and nocturnal conversation a mother has with her soul, with her child, and with Gaea, visible by day and audible by night.” The figure of the woman becomes one with the strength of the earth and the dark of the night, dimensions or attributes of the great Mother Goddess, the womb that generates all existence, the alpha and omega of creation. And this is the vision that Violeta reaches at the end of the song, when she recognizes the communion that gives rise to the word as a manifestation of that generative force: “y el canto de ustedes que es el mismo canto, / y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto” [and your song, which is the same song / and everyone’s song, which is my own song].
A not-insignificant detail on the process of writing “Gracias a la vida,” which reveals Violeta’s poetic genius and her concern for the creation of images, is the fact that there are multiple versions of the lyrics. A first draft was recovered and published in Chile in 2016 by UV Editorial, in the only book thus far to bring together Violeta Parra’s work under the heading of poetry. Some of the text’s most beautiful images emerge from the work of rewriting; they are not present in the first version. A few examples: “Me ha dado los ojos con que estoy mirando” [it has given me the eyes through which I’m looking] changes in the final version to “me dio dos luceros que cuando los abro” [it gave me two bright stars, and when I open them]; “Me ha dado el sonido con que estoy hablando” [it has given me the sound with which I’m speaking] becomes “me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario” [it has given me sound, and the letters of the alphabet]; “Me dio el corazón que está palpitando” [it gave me the heart that is beating] becomes “Me dio el corazón que agita su marco” [it gave me my heart, that shakes in its frame]. Violeta replaces all the gerunds and imbues the verses with sensory details, with flights of poetry.
III
The album’s songs are organized into two sets: the A-side and the B-side. The former, starting with “Gracias a la vida,” also includes the antithesis of this universal anthem—one of the most striking and intense songs about her heartrending experience of love and, thus, of all life’s dimensions: “Maldigo del alto cielo.” The décimas that make up this song are a rebellion against all possible orders of nature and humanity, with their history, their hierarchies, their borders, and their symbols (“Maldigo la solitaria / figura de la bandera, / maldigo cualquier emblema: / la Venus y la araucaria, / el trino de la canaria; / el cosmos y sus planetas, / la tierra y todas sus grietas / porque me aqueja un pesar” [Goddamn getting on your feet / to watch the flag go by / damn every kind of lie / Venus and Main Street / and the canary’s tweet / the planets and their motions / the earth with its erosions / because my heart is sore (tr. John Felstiner and Donald Walsh), including, of course, language itself: “Maldigo el vocablo ‘amor’ / con toda su porquería. ¡Cuánto será mi dolor!” [goddamn that one word love / with all its nastiness / my pain’s as bad as that].
Here, the same driving force that celebrates existence in “Gracias a la vista” reviles and destroys the preconceived cosmos, only to renew it through chaos.
Between these two extremes, as a possibility of the voice that pulls away from identification with the forces of creation and puts experience in perspective, emerges one of the most beautiful and peculiar songs of Violeta’s whole repertoire, and one that deserves more attention than it has yet been given: “Cantores que reflexionan.” This song, a poetics in the form of a fable, which meditates on the place of the song and the singer in the world, combines characteristics of the refalosa, a folk dance that came to Chile from Peru in colonial times, with a sound that evokes medieval dances. Instead of the typical octosyllable, Violeta uses the hendecasyllable—a meter on which Mistral left her rural, sapiental mark—and tells us a story outside of time, whose truth is rooted in all times at once:
En la prisión de la ansiedad
medita un astro en alta voz.
Gime y se agita como león,
como queriéndose escapar.
¿De dónde viene su corcel
con ese brillo abrumador?
Parece falso el arrebol
que se desprende de su ser.
“Viene del reino de Satán”
—toda su sangre respondió—.
Quemas el árbol del amor,
dejas cenizas al pasar.
Va prisiones del placer
y siervo de la vanidad,
busca la luz de la verdad,
mas la mentira está a sus pies.
Gloria le tiende terca red
y le aprisiona el corazón
en los silencios de su voz
que se va ahogando sin querer.
[In the prison of anxiety
a star ponders aloud.
He whines and shakes like a lion,
as if he wanted to escape.
Where did his steed come from
with that overwhelming shine?
The afterglow that’s coming off his being
seems unreal.
“He comes from the kingdom of Satan,”
all his blood answers.
You burn the tree of love,
you leave ashes in your footsteps.
Go, prisons of pleasure
and slave to vanity,
seek out the light of truth
while lies are at your feet
Glory casts her dogged net
and traps his heart
in the silence of her voice]
that is accidentally drowning.]
This song tells of the singer-hero’s path and of all the challenges he must face in the journey toward himself—the inner shadows that are embodied in external characters: pleasure, vanity, lies, glory—until we come to the twist, and consciousness (also as a character) is illuminated, leading the singer to recognize the true reason that must give life and direction to his song:
Y su conciencia dijo al fin:
“Cántale al hombre en su dolor,
en su miseria y su sudor
y en su motivo de existir”.
Hoy es su canto un azadón
que le abre surcos al vivir,
a la justicia en su raíz
y a los raudales de su voz.
En su divina comprensión
luces brotaban del cantor.
[And his conscience said in the end:
“Sing to man in his pain,
in his hardship and sweat,
in his reason for being.”
Today his song is a mattock
that cuts furrows in life,
in the justice at its root
and the torrents of its voice.
In his divine understanding
lights shine out from the singer.]
Pain, as an experience shared by all human beings and as the root of beauty and truth, is the essence that puts all of Violeta Parra’s creations in motion. I cannot help but recall the answer she gave when asked which form of expression she would choose if she had to keep just one (out of song, painting, embroidery, etc.). She was emphatic: “I would keep people.”
IV
They say Violeta learned to play the guitar by watching and by ear; she didn’t know what the notes were called, but she knew how to use them. When writing and composing, she allowed herself to be guided by intuition, and this was her advice to young artists: “Write how you want, use whatever rhythms come out, try different instruments, sit at the piano and destroy the meter, shout instead of singing, blow the guitar and ring the trumpet, hate mathematics and love whirlpools. Creation is a bird without a flight plan that will never fly in a straight line.” But, at the same time, she strove to learn from those who came before her, to acquire a profound knowledge of Chilean folk traditions, to go to the lost corners of Chile to recover the song of the human and the divine. And she entered into dialogue not only with Chilean folklore, but also with that which she found in the other parts of the world to which her journey took her.
This blend of tradition and her own spirit that nourished her work is beautifully expressed in the song that starts off the B-side of Las últimas composiciones: “Mazúrquica modérnica.” The mazurka is a traditional dance from Poland, first danced in the halls of the Szlachta or Polish nobility, which then went on to become a part of popular culture. It has a ternary rhythm, which is to say, it is divided into bars of three beats each. If we look at the meter Violeta used to compose this song’s lyrics, we can divide each verse into four clauses, each with three syllables: “Me han preguntádico varias persónicas / si peligrósicas para las másicas / son las canciónicas agitadóricas” [Many people have asked me / if arousing songs / are dangerous for the masses]; the sound goes, “títata-títata-títata-títata.” The beauty of this song is how she makes use of the joyful, light, and bouncy temperament this musical form evokes, intensifying it by putting stress on the words’ antepultimate syllable—a pattern that is uncommon in Spanish, which naturally stresses the penultimate syllable—thereby adding the irony that saturates this song’s message: the singing voice that represents the working class accepts the infantilization implicit in its counterpart’s paternalistic question—the “caballerísticos almidonánicos” [starched gentlemen] of the political and economic elite—and responds from there.
The political position implicit in this question is broken down throughout the song through a double-edged mockery: that of the voice, assuming an innocent, playful tone to prove that what’s ridiculous is, in fact, the status quo that the dominant class defends, and the social injustices that perpetuate it:
Le he contestádico yo al preguntónico
cuando la guática pide comídica
pone al cristiánico firme y guerrérico
por sus poróticos y sus cebóllicas.
No hay regimiéntico que los deténguica
si tienen hámbrica los populáricos.
Preguntadónicos, partidirísticos
disimuládicos y muy malúricos
son peligrósicos más que los vérsicos,
más que las huélguicas y los desfílicos.
Bajito cuérdica firman papélicos,
lavan sus mánicos como piláticos.
[I have answered the question
when the belly asks for food
the Christian grows staunch and warlike
for his beans and onions.
No regiment can hold them back
when the common folk are hungry.
Asking questions, towing party lines,
obscured and very achey
they are more dangerous than lines of poetry,
more than strikes and marches.
Under the rose they sign their papers,
they wash their hands like little Pilates.]
The modernity of Violeta Parra’s mazurka lies in its critical consciousness of the world and the discourse on which it is constructed. Using language in its favor, through a delicate and sensitive treatment of words and their inner music, their sounds and meanings, she awakens our ears, heads, feet, and hearts.
V
Las últimas composiciones is a journey of sound and word, sense and spirit, with no way back: it is a work that leaves us in a different existential place from the one we were in before listening. Love and tenderness transform, from one moment to another, into open sky, the dark night of the soul, and through their subtleties and heartbreaks we enter into our most intimate truth, as individuals and as cells of a greater body.
This is not the place for me to outline every stop on this journey, but I do invite you all to follow the path and experience it for yourselves. Along with the songs I have mentioned, there are many others; each one puts forth a color, an intensity, a truth of the body and soul that moves us to our core: “El albertío,” “Pupila de águila,” “Run-run se fue pa’l norte,” “La cueca de los poetas,” “Volver a los 17,” “Rin del angelito,” “Una copla me ha cantado,” “El guillatún,” “Pastelero a tus pasteles,” and “De cuerpo entero.” This last song, a cueca, closes out the album. To me, it is the synthesis of all the veins that open at the album’s different moments, with direct and emphatic language bolstered by the genre of the cueca, which some have called the “compressed sonnet”:
El humano está formado
de un espíritu y un cuerpo
de un corazón que palpita
al son de los sentimientos.
No entiendo los amores
del alma sola
cuando el cuerpo es un río
de bellas olas.
De bellas olas, sí,
que le dan vida.
Si falta un elemento
negra es la herida.
Comprende que te quiero
de cuerpo entero.
[The human being is made
of a spirit and a body
of a heart that beats
to the rhythm of feelings.
I don’t understand the loves
of the soul alone
when the body is a river
of lovely waves.
Yes, of lovely waves
that give it life.
If an element is missing
the wound turns black.
Know that I love you
with my whole body.]
Violeta Parra loved and created with her whole body, and every time we listen to her, her poetry invites us to follow her.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
