Cuban singer Silvio Rodríguez sat down for an interview with the digital journal Escambray shortly after the release of his book Cancionero (Songbook), published by Ojalá publishing house. The songbook, illustrated with Rodríguez’s drawings, summarizes four decades of his song-writing through photos, lyrics, poetry, and art. Here are some excerpts. The interview (published in a somewhat peculiar English), can be accessed through the link below. (I have made some slight changes on the excerpts for the sake of clarity.)
José Marti, whose imprint appears in some of his pieces, exerted great influence on his works and way of thinking, and he acknowledges ([Martí’s] The Golden Age as one of his earliest readings . . .
“. . . the Martí accompanying me is the human being, the son, the friend, the comrade he was, plus the patriot endowed with cosmopolitan spirit. I am also taking his substantial and beautiful stanzas with me.”
. . . Rodríguez points out the importance of lyrics- or poetry-, that he started to enjoy being a kid thanks to his father, a farmer who used to read Darío, Martí, Nicolás Guillén and others. His readings- he comments- included authors who “shook me twice with abandon”, such as Cuban José Zacarías Tallet, Eliseo Diego and Rubén Martínez Villegas, whom he regards a “bedside one” nowadays. Also César Vallejos, “who condemned me to eternal fascination” and Saint-John Perse. About the latter he tells an anecdote: “I was in the barracks, and a rookie in love with exuberant images was reading Perse out loud, and I became infected me immediately, until now. Then he lent me a marvelous bilingual edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I stupidly gave him back 20 years later”.
Love is a recurrent topic in Rodríguez’s compositions so he wonders what human coupling would be all about without the so-called love songs, which are like a connecting thread toward all times and places; an inextinguishable theme renewed by each human group and stage with their characteristics”.Even his testimonial lyrics, far from any voluntarism and highfalutin tones, move along a string which is both intimate and confidential. “Ever since I was a boy, I went into the street to support the revolutionary process enthusiastically, but when I started to sing I avoided making pamphlets. I am the kind of person who cannot put up with flattering what he respects.”
Silvio, who concedes to have praised exceptionally- “Canción urgente a Nicaragua” being a good example-, affirms that the “we” identifying songs should be the need on the singer’s part to say that he is part of a collective dignity. He also says that from the very beginning he thought that songs’ topics and vocabulary had to be enlarged as they both seemed stale to him. Therefore, he looked for words that were seldom used to make songs with them. The search led him to expressions discriminated against by the prevailing morale. Hence, “La era está pariendo un corazón” was said to be counterrevolutionary because for some people the word “to bring forth” was immoral, much more if it was used in a song. “That is”, he said, “declaring that I tried to sing and cry, live, love, war, pain, was little less than a sacrilege”.
Last May 4, Rodríguez’s visa to the United States for attending the homage paid to folk musician Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday was delayed so much, that he could not take part in it. Apart from being discriminated against, he adds: “We have been at loggerhead for many years, and that has conditioned both parties. In the US, many mechanisms keep on working on the obsolete meaning of the cold war. The same happens in Cuba, but mollified by the fact that we have been the country historically attacked.”
“I would like to see what share of that change proclaimed by the new US administration is allotted to the Cubans living in Cuba. I would not like to believe that the good will of that government is only for those who want to live there or those who think like them”.
Songbook puts forth tunes of his upcoming album Second date, among them, Tonada del albedrío, a song devoted to Che.
Silvio regrets that the collapse of Eastern Europe was followed by a media war distorting the meaning of human freedom and reducing the hopes of social changes “to the most fateful experiences of real socialism”. According to his view, Che is among the revolutionary examples that globalization is trying to wipe out, and Tonada del albedrío deals with three key aspects of Che’s thinking.
Lastly, the troubadour, who made his debut one day after being discharged from military service on a prime-time TV program called Música y Estrellas, in 1967, bets on a new challenge: “I must concede that I am still interested in singing what is challenging; what is forbidden is interesting, above all, when it goes beyond the little game of watching if you dare”.
You can find the interview at http://www.escambray.cu/Eng/culture/Cchallenging090814112.htm
