Spanish (page 24)

Beginners’ Spanish II (SPAN 203): Listening to Music

Amanda Caceres, Winter 2024

For this assignment, I chose to listen to the album De Todas las Flores by singer-songwriter Natalia Lafourcade. Lafourcade is a world-renowned Mexican artist whose style consists of influences from jazz, pop, and Mexican folk. De Todas las Flores first debuted in 2022 with a performance in New York at Carnegie Hall. Lafourcade then toured the album internationally in 2023 (Dudamel).

While I don’t listen to much Mexican folk or pop, I’m still somewhat familiar with the style. Songs like Vine Solita, María la Curandera, and Caminar Bonito seemed to be very strongly influenced by these styles. Other songs, like Llévame Viento and El Lugar Correcto, had stronger jazz influences. Of course, many of these songs, especially ones like Mi Manera de Querer, blended influences from both styles, resulting in a Latin Jazz sound. It reminded me a bit of Brazil’s Bossa Nova, which was a genre that blended jazz and samba. Of course, Brazilian and Mexican music are very different, but it’s interesting seeing the differences and similarities in their jazz-influenced styles.

It was interesting hearing Spanish in a musical context after having studied it more. Many of the subjects we’ve studied in class (preterite, gerund, etc.) helped me to better understand more of the lyrics. For example: “En cada día estoy naciendo” from Vine Solita. The way Lafourcade sings is quite clear, so I didn’t have too much difficulty understanding many of the words. As a matter of fact, there were times where certain words were rhythmically stretched out to be slower, making it easier to understand them. Some of the phrases I read, though, were harder to understand thanks to their poetic nature. Lyrics are impossible to translate perfectly, since each language has its own poetic phrases that make sense within that cultural context, but that context is lost in other languages. Poetry also makes use of the different language tools found in its own language (grammar, structure, etc.), but no two languages have the exact same tools. For example, the line “Viento, hoy necesito un abrazo que rompa el hielo” from Llévame Viento is beautiful in Spanish, translates directly as “Wind, now I need a hug that breaks the sky” in English, which isn’t as nice. I could fully understand some of these phrases in Spanish, but there were others that I didn’t fully understand thanks to their poetic nature and my lack of cultural context. One such line, “Cúrante, mijita, el dolor con nuestra luz del sol” from María la Curandera, was a bit confusing to me until I looked up what a curandera is. With that knowledge, the line makes a bit more sense to me. There have been times in class where certain sentences we read didn’t make much sense to me at first, until I learned the cultural context of a phrase or word.

Works Cited

Dudamel, Gustavo. “Natalia Lafourcade.” LA Phil, https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/artists/2973/natalia-lafourcade. Accessed 14 February 2024.

De Todas las Flores: