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Canta y no llores
Mar. 31st, 2007 08:45 amMy niece's fiance speaks Spanish, and as you might imagine that came in handy more than once in Costa Rica. It wasn't all for practical purposes either.
On Monday night we ate at the Mexican restaurant in the resort. It was one of two (the other was Italian) that you had to make reservations for. The food was superb, too. I had an Acapulcan ceviche -- fresh, raw fish in lime juice with cilantro and onions -- and a beautiful little rare steak with sweet plantains on the side. Anyway, Mexican songs were playing over the speakers, and of course one of them was what I've always thought of as the "ay ay ay ay" song. You know the one. Every mariachi band plays it, and we've all heard it a million times. But this time my sister asked Jake what the chorus was saying. He was uncharacteristically hesitant when he said, "I think it's 'sing, don't cry.'" He said the Spanish words, and I heard it as "cantai no yores," and then I could hear that in the song, too. In any event, I loved the sentiment! Very Almodovar, I thought. A florid version of "it's all good."
I sang or hummed it almost continually for the next couple of days until I got home and was able to do some googling. I discovered that the actual words are "canta y no llores," of course, and that the song is called "Cielito Lindo". Other than that, I haven't been able to find much that is definitive about the song. There are a zillion restaurants apparently named after the song, from Buenos Aires to San Juan to LA, but where does the song come from? It appears to be an anonymous folk song, but googling the lyrics has produced more frustration and variation than insight. Was Jake's hesitation because this is some kind of strange dialect? Can anybody help me out here? What is this song about? You would think that such a famous song would have a lot of knowledgeable discussion around it, but maybe it's all in Spanish. The translations I've found are practically incoherent, although it's pretty clearly a song about romantic suffering.
On Monday night we ate at the Mexican restaurant in the resort. It was one of two (the other was Italian) that you had to make reservations for. The food was superb, too. I had an Acapulcan ceviche -- fresh, raw fish in lime juice with cilantro and onions -- and a beautiful little rare steak with sweet plantains on the side. Anyway, Mexican songs were playing over the speakers, and of course one of them was what I've always thought of as the "ay ay ay ay" song. You know the one. Every mariachi band plays it, and we've all heard it a million times. But this time my sister asked Jake what the chorus was saying. He was uncharacteristically hesitant when he said, "I think it's 'sing, don't cry.'" He said the Spanish words, and I heard it as "cantai no yores," and then I could hear that in the song, too. In any event, I loved the sentiment! Very Almodovar, I thought. A florid version of "it's all good."
I sang or hummed it almost continually for the next couple of days until I got home and was able to do some googling. I discovered that the actual words are "canta y no llores," of course, and that the song is called "Cielito Lindo". Other than that, I haven't been able to find much that is definitive about the song. There are a zillion restaurants apparently named after the song, from Buenos Aires to San Juan to LA, but where does the song come from? It appears to be an anonymous folk song, but googling the lyrics has produced more frustration and variation than insight. Was Jake's hesitation because this is some kind of strange dialect? Can anybody help me out here? What is this song about? You would think that such a famous song would have a lot of knowledgeable discussion around it, but maybe it's all in Spanish. The translations I've found are practically incoherent, although it's pretty clearly a song about romantic suffering.
