When I first began translating these lyrics in late 2005, I was taking a break from several more ambitious translation projects. I found many of these lyrics simplistic, but they grew on me a couple months into what ended up becoming a two-year engagement. Many of these texts, like great song lyrics generally, are disarmingly simple on the surface. I recall now that when I began dancing in 2001, my reaction to the tunes (after 6 solid years of listening to classical music) underwent a very similar progression. Tango does not reveal its depths to you at a distance; there is, almost out of necessity, no way to know it unless you have lived with it, unless it comes back to you from the past.

This nostalgia is itself a tango commonplace—quite possibly the master theme of the tango—and I don't understand very clearly how its contagion operates with such inevitability. Yet it does; there is no use arguing around it.

As for the translations: I look at them now, and don't know how to estimate them. They were done in a hurry, usually one every week; I would sometimes read them with pencil in hand. It became a ritual to confer beforehand with the bartender at Divino Lounge (where the bulk of them were recited during the intermission of a Wednesday night milonga) over minor grammatical issues or lunfardo shadings. He despised our milonga: only a handful of us ever bought drinks, and there was little in the dancing that matched what he and other non-dancing Argentines thought of as the genuine article. Week by week, though, my scribbled-over manuscripts drew him in; by year two, I'd walk through the door and get not only a greeting from this otherwise surly and underpaid fellow, but he'd clear a space for me and my first glass of "kerosene" at the bar.

Besides getting to know the music on a much different level, I learned something my other translations didn't offer me to the same degree. My other projects were literary: meant to be read. These texts, I realized after a while (it took some time to sink in), are vocal: meant to be sung. From the beginning, I strove to reproduce the rhythms of the originals; but I had not considered which notes, which syllables, would be held long—and that's a matter of vowels more than anything. There are some vowels you can hold, and some vowel you can't. Young poets nowadays don't bother to educate themselves very deeply when it comes to technical matters; I had, and I hadn't even begun to explore this area. I bought several volumes of jazz lyrics and went back to Tennyson and Yeats and re-read Poe's brilliant essay "The Rationale of Verse" (still the only sensible treatise around), and looked over my own technical notes, and in short, got engaged on a whole different level.

Publicly, I've been taking a break since 2007, except for a few pieces commissioned for stage works... Privately, I've continued working on tango lyrics intermittently, and am now preparing a new batch of translations for inclusion in a book. The author of that book first got in touch with me because of the texts on my website. Strangely, it's usually porteños who like my work most, and who commend me for catching the flavor of the originals in English. So far, the negative criticism I've received—I mean the wholly negative criticism, which is usually quite disrespectful—has come exclusively from Anglophones. I've learned to dismiss these reactions entirely. Usually they accuse me of disrespect; and by their volunteered corrections, I see at once that my critic manqué prefers a translation which is literal to the point grammatical and lexical perversion. Someone even urged on me "I work as hard as a roast chicken" as an accurate rendering of "Trabajo como un hornero" ("I'm a baker by day"). And this line is from a text I haven't even translated. One wonders what to make of such correspondence.

In any case, I can rest assured that whether I did a fine job or not with any particular text, reciting the translation had a palpable effect on the dancers. The floor was not spacious, and floorcraft was sometimes perilous at this milonga. Yet every single time I read a translation, giving all the dancers (not just the Spanish-speakers) at least a glimpse of what the next song was about, the ronda cleared up: people were a little more inward, more sensitive, more kind to the others around them. Sometimes I'd plop down next to the DJ, take a gulp of wine, look at my wreck of a reading copy, and say: "Well, at least everyone will dance nice for three minutes." She would usually smile, then turn to her laptop screen and piece together the rest of the tanda, with the expression still lighting up her face. At a time when poetry has never mattered less to people, it's yet some small comfort to think that it can, with some certainty, if only for a song, restore us to a state approaching purity.