ABSTRACT
The popular Cuban song El son de la loma (The Song from the Hill) begins with the question, “¿De dónde son los cantantes? (Where do the singers come from?) metaphorically bringing into focus questions of origins of popular cultural forms and their circulation through a variety of sound technologies, including motion pictures. A characteristically Cuban musical form, the son blends African rhythms and Spanish melodies. Son de la lomawas popularized on radio and phonograph recordings by the famed Cuban sonero Trio Matamoros during the “golden age” of Cuban music in the 1930s, quickly becoming a musical standard throughout the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. As such, the song serves as a representative example of the transfer and transformation of “traditional, collective creativity, commonly called ‘folklore,’ to the domain of the mass media, the ‘mass culture’ of technical
reproduction and industrial commercialization.”2 Given its hybrid origins in African Cuban culture, and its subsequent circulation, Son de la loma suggests a version of what Walter Benjamin termed the “afterlife of the work of art.” Writing about the social significance of translation, Benjamin asserted:
Indeed, over the years Son de la loma underwent a series of such translations in ways that illuminate our appreciation of the particular status of aural traditions in the shaping of Latin American cultural identity. After its initial period of mass-circulation through recordings and radio, the lyrics resurfaced in the title of Severo Sarduy’s novel De dónde son los cantantes (1967) as it reshaped the song’s question into a parody of Cuban literary constructions of national identity. Interestingly, the novel, written in France by the self-exiled Cuban writer, benefited from the “boom” of Latin American fiction in the 1960s, indirectly bringing the original song into a broader pan-Hispanic cultural circuit far beyond its original Cuban and Caribbean origins. In 1976, Cuban filmmaker Luis Felipe Bernaza made a documentary that took as its title that now familiar question, Where Do the Singers Come From? as if to reaffirm the narrower “national” roots of Cuban music through a cinematic examination of the history of the Cuban sonero tradition. Aimed at celebrating through Cuba’s revolutionary stateorchestrated cinema “music of certain popular authentic values,”4 the film, in fact, worked as an implicitly political response to Sarduy’s appropriation of the song’s initial question. Such varied appropriations of a traditional melody are indeed “translations” in the sense that Benjamin uses the word. They transpose popular cultural traditions into new contexts, radically reforming the meanings of the original, yet anchoring the new version within the genealogy of the original “text.”
