Читать книгу Out of Their Minds - Luis Humberto Crosthwaite - Страница 8

A QUICK NOTE ABOUT TRANSLATION AND MUSIC:

Luis’ novel Out of Their Minds is full of references to popular Mexican music, meaning mostly songs with Spanish lyrics by Mexican musicians. But also a lot of American stuff. Luis loved to grab song titles or snippets of lyrics for chapter titles. I tried translating those into English, even enlisted my dad the poet to smooth them out. But they sounded clumsy and leaden in English. Worse still, the lyrics had no cultural connection to American readers.

So I gave up on translating the lyrics directly and tried instead to think of American songs that reminded me of the Spanish ones. The book is named after a real classic, “Idos de la Mente” (“Out of Our Minds”). I’d read the book all the way through before I heard that one the first time. And when I did, I immediately thought it was a song that Muddy Waters could have sung. The Mexican and American songwriters were singing the same things, just in different languages.

That idea shaped the direction of the chapter titles. A lot of them come from the blues/country/etc. mishmash that shaped early rock’n’roll, or from the early years that followed. And since the music is so fun, I wanted to share it with you. You can scan the QR code on the left to open up a playlist of the music in Spotify. You can also get it the playlist by going to this page on our website:

http://www.cincopuntos.com/products_detail.sstg?id=147.