Master's Degree in Language Sciences Final Thesis
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Master’s Degree in Language Sciences Final Thesis Tango As a Piece Of Life Analysis Of Lunfardo Images In Tango Lyrics Supervisor Ch. Prof. Enric Bou Maqueda Assistant supervisor Ch. Prof. Alessandro Scarsella Graduand Elena Rudnitskaia Matricolation number 874132 Academic Year 2019 / 2020 Index Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 2 I. Literature Review ................................................................................................ 7 1.1. Literature on tango .......................................................................................................... 7 1.1.1. Gender representations in tango ............................................................................ 8 1.1.2. Tango history and its origins ................................................................................ 11 1.1.3. Immigration and tango.......................................................................................... 17 1.1.4. Tango as a social instrument ................................................................................ 21 1.1.5. Other studies ......................................................................................................... 25 1.2. Literature on lunfardo ......................................................................................... 27 1.2.1. Lunfardo origins and history ...................................................................... 27 1.2.2. Linguistic characteristics of lunfardo ........................................................ 33 1.2.3. Lunfardo and cocoliche .............................................................................. 38 1.2.4. Lunfardo in literature and in modern life ................................................... 43 I.3 Literature on tango and lunfardo ....................................................................... 47 II. Methodological Design ...................................................................................... 57 2.1.Basic Concepts ..................................................................................................... 57 2.2.Research Question ............................................................................................... 57 2.3.Methodology Selected ......................................................................................... 58 2.4.Language .............................................................................................................. 58 2.5.The Researcher .................................................................................................... 59 2.6.Data Collection Procedures ................................................................................. 59 2.7.Data Analysis ....................................................................................................... 60 2.8.Summary .............................................................................................................. 60 III. Results ................................................................................................................. 61 3.1. General overview of lunfardo terms in the corpus ............................................. 61 3.2. Semantic fields of lunfardo terms in the narrowed corpus, themes and images in tango .......................................................................................................... 66 3.3. Key content words comparison in songs with lunfardo terms and without them ........................................................................................................................... 73 IV. Discussion ........................................................................................................... 77 4.1 Bacán(a) (“wealthy man/woman”) and milonguera (“fallen woman”) . 77 4.2. Mishiadura (“poverty”) ........................................................................... 88 4.3. Gotán (“tango”) ................................................................................................ 97 4.4. Percanta (“beloved woman”) and metejón (“falling in love”) ....................... 104 Conclusions .................................................................................................................. 111 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 116 Sitography .................................................................................................................... 120 Appendix ...................................................................................................................... 121 Introduction “What is tango for you?” I asked an old milonguero1 El Chino Perico2 who was dancing for more than 50 years. The answer was simple and very deep at the same time: “Tango is a piece of life…” (El Chino Perico, personal communication, November 9, 2019) Tango lyrics are the concentration of all the feelings and emotions. The essential tan- go themes are “the death, the inexorable pass of time, el desarraigo, the search of one’s own identity… unshared love and the nostalgia for a paradise lost” (Conde, 2003) This paradise lost in the case of the Argentinean reality of the end of the 19th beginning of 20th century can be easily understood as a loss of one’s fatherland. Let’s remember Armando Discepolo’s Stefano, a tragic grotesque story about an Italian musician who came to Argentina in search of his dream and then got disillusioned. “We were born in a place... (With fervor) Ah Napoli, far away in the time!... in a place where if you just di- ve into the water from the rock you get out of it with shining skin and a fresh oyster in your hand. ¡What a pleasure! ...At dawn. ..still feeling the warmth of the bed. ..Everything around you was singing; everything was a hope”, was remembering his fatherland a failed genius musician. The immigrants, who were mostly coming from Italy (about 45%), brought with them not only their customs, their culture but also their words. Lunfardo (from Italian Romanesque dialect where lombardo means “thief”, which is believed to be later on transformed into lunfardo), “a regional language of Rio de la Plata” was born together with “development of the marginal urban sectors who came to live to Buenos Aires” (Gottero, 2008, p.7) In the process of their integration to 1 Milonguero is a person who often goes out to dance the tango. 2 One of the most famous tango maestros of old school in Buenos Aires. 2 new society immigrants were enriching the language and the culture of their new father- land. Immigration was one of the key elements forming Argentinean culture at the begin- ning of the XX century. At this period and many decades later it was the leitmotif in the literature, theatre, and cinema. Tango, one of the most beautiful dances in the world with its passionate nature, penetrating music and dramatic deep texts would have never be born or, at least, would not be as we know it if there were no Italian, Spanish, French, Russian and many other immigrants who were coming to another continent in search of a better life. Both tango lyrics and lunfardo pertain to language studies field, both have social character and both are in some way products of immigrants’ culture. Moreover, their interconnection cannot be unnoticed. There would not be tango lyrics like we know it if there were not lunfardo with its colorful words (botón lit.3 “button”, cana lit. “gray hair”, abanico ‘just to tell “policeman”). In its turn, lunfardo would not be so popular and commonly used without tango. Lunfardo words were spreading and occupying their place in Argentineans’ lexicon thanks to tango which being a part of popular culture was very widespread. Tango in 2009 was declared as UNESCO cultural heritage and one might think that this field was intensively studied by the specialists in music, dance as well as by the lin- guists and literature experts. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true. The academic world has always been ignoring tango, so its history was written mainly by newspapers (Conde, 2003). Few researchers have addressed seriously the topic of tango lyrics. If 3 The acronym lit. stands for “literally” and will be referred throughout this paper as the standard meaning of the world. 3 there have not been Gobello, Sierra, Ferrer, Conde tango songs would not have been dealt with in-depth at all. When there was a meeting with Maria Nieves, one of the most famous tango dancers, who together with Juan Carlos Copes in far 1970s brought tango escenario to Broadway and to the White House, she pronounced a phrase full of sorrow and bitterness “Tango still remains a bad word”. Conde (2003) tells that his curriculum as a tango researcher was welcomed with contempt “as if studying Cadicamo or Fito Paez was less important than studying Ezra Pound or Petrarch” (p. 12). Tango which represents by far the most important part of the Argentinean poetics of the XX century, ironically, has been identi- fied as something which is not worth studying. Luckily, tango, not appreciated enough in its own country has become a big object of studies in other countries. Conde (2003) lists such cities as: “Toulousse, Utrecht, Maas- tricht and Brujas” (p. 12) where tango is studied at universities. However, the character- istics of tango poetics have not been dealt with in-depth. In literature faculties through all of the world students study Shakespeare, Petrarch, Donne, and other immortal