Loved by many dancers for its fateful melody and its atmospheric story, the tango “Duelo criollo” departs from the cabaret cityscape of the 1920s to depict a scene that then obsessed the urban mind: the daring knife fights of the roughnecks in the hard scrabble of the outskirts. The tango, sung in brilliant narrative fashion by Gardel, was to be the biggest success for both of its authors, composer Juan Rezzano and lyricist Lito Bayardo.
The knife duel was an image that fascinated Borges, who treated its primal, lawless, often pointless showdown as a kernel of the national identity. The duel itself appears elliptically in this tango, just a glimpse tempting the listener’s imagination: all we are given is two men dying in the light of a streetlamp. Most of the story focuses on its cause—a quarrel over the town beauty—and the aftermath: the girl’s sad singing. Or is it the troubadour’s song, still drifting over the neighborhood, through her, or as a ghost? “They say” she was the prize of the place, as the country scene begins to merge with the slums of the city outskirts… and as the tale drifts in and out of the aura of legend.
Dagger Duel
(Tr. Jake Spatz)
YouTube: Carlos Gardel | Jorge Durán (orq. Di Sarli)
When the moon’s cloudless shining
Bathes the world in silver,
Like the sobs of one pining
You can make out her song;
Her old song sweet and heartfelt
To which the whole town attended
As a silence descended
On the great house of old.
They say she was
The lass of the neighborhood,
The borough’s pride and joy,
Who loved a troubadour.
She was the one girl he sang love for
At the foot of her windowsill.
But still another love
For that same woman rose
Within the beating heart
Of the biggest rogue in town:
And a streetlamp saw them in a dagger duel,
Beneath whose feeble light, they both went down.
And now a moan rises nightly
From the calm of the silence,
That same song that clasped tightly
That old love that has gone…
The pretty girl in her sorrow
Spread her wings open widely,
And with her virtue and finery,
To heaven’s height fluttered on.
Duelo criollo (1928)
Music: Juan Rezzano
Lyrics: Lito Bayardo
Mientras la luna serena
baña con su luz de plata
como un sollozo de pena
se oye cantar su canción;
la canción dulce y sentida
que todo el barrio escuchaba
cuando el silencio reinaba
en el viejo caserón.
Cuentan que fue
la piba de arrabal,
la flor del barrio aquel
que amaba un payador.
Sólo para ella cantó el amor
al pie de su ventanal;
pero otro amor
por aquella mujer,
nació en el corazón
del taura más mentao
que un farol, en duelo criollo vio,
bajo su débil luz, morir los dos.
Por eso gime en las noches
de tan silenciosa calma
esa canción que es el broche
de aquel amor que pasó…
De pena la linda piba
abrió bien anchas sus alas
y con su virtud y sus galas
hasta el cielo se voló.