Come provare ad imparare almeno l’inglese scritto quando il tempo corre via svelto e le capacità di studio si riducono?
Astime suggerisce di lavorare sulla motivazione e, quindi, di partire da Nina Simone. La musicista che in questi anni mi accompagna, sorprendendomi sempre per la sua modernità, classicità e pathos interpretativo.
E allora ecco la “traduzione” (chiedo venia) del testo Il Regno segreto di Nina Simone.
Ogni correzione sarà molto gradita.
Nina Simone isn’t just a Cult of mine, but a companion in my days and nights.
When I need something close to perfection then Nina appears. Perhaps in the years ‘70 I met for first time one of her disksdisk: “The Amazing Nina Simone” (1959). In the while i’m writing, that LP is the next to me with her best photo representing: alone, closed eyes, her armes and beautiful holding together the notes.
At first i didn’t appreciate it: a cult comes when it decides to spread out.
I was enlightened when i got fifty, for two concomitant reasons: the listening of the 10 minutes of “Sinnerman” in “Pastel Blues” (1965) and the Cd “Nina Simone and Piano” (1968). Dear reader, test to listen to “Who Am I” and perhaps also you will enter in her kingdom. And’ also happened with her most sensitive biographer: “a song as Sinnerman, , the certainty that this music had been always there and asked only to be identified” (David Brun-Lambert, Nina Simone: a Life, Flammarion, 2005).
From that moment I can wander about the discovery of other musicians and these can help to cheer me the life, but later I always return from her. And every time it renews equally the emotion. Sometimes (but my wife everytimes says) up to the tears, as in the poetries.
Nina Simone doesn’t only sing: Nina Simone interprets as a theatrical actor. This almost unique ability has elegantly suffered by Charles Aznavour that said: “The people that sing the jazz often sing the music. Nina Simone sings the text at the same time of the music.”
That’s why “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To”, a standard jazz in fast time, with Nina Simone it becomes up to the pang slow and because “Strange Fruit” it is agonizing even more that in Billie Holiday. Her songs and her piano, to an impassioned listening, can be “seen” as brushes: black, yellow, blue (lot of blue), white.. All this has done with the voice, with the notes of the piano, but above all with the times that it puts among the words. They are these instants of silence, these breaks to produce the magic. And this was really what she wanted to get: dear reader try with “The Put To Spell On You” ….
Also her re-interpretations (Jacques Brel, J.J. Walker, George Harrison, Randy Newman, Bob Dylan) are a ri-creation: those songs become more beautiful. Dear reader try with “Ne me quitte pas“, ” Mr Bojangles“, “Baltimore“, “Here Comes The Sun“, “Just Like Tom Thumb Blues.” Her music goes long in the time. A lot of musical fashions pass. But even if her song has been arriving from the years ‘50, ‘60, ‘70, with Nina the time seems not to pass.
Other songs rest become beautiful music, but dated. For the songs of Nina Simone it can be said what Italo Calvino said of books: “Classical are those books which you usually say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading…” [...] A classical is a book that never finish to say what it has to say. [...]
I wonder me how Nina Simone is both so always actual and modern. I believe that her music has been the only energy that has held her long live, in the relationship with herself and with its public.
Dear reader: what do you wait to also enter into her secret kingdom?
La storia è fatta anche di cifre che parlano, che hanno un loro linguaggio, una loro concretezza, a volte triste.
