Malagueña

Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony no 14: 2. Allegretto. Malagueña (words by Federico García Lorca, translated to Russian by Anatoli Geleskul), Anne-Karin Mikonaho, soprano.   It's from García Lorca's first major book of poetry, Poema del cante jondo, written in 1921 but not published until 1931.  Within five years of its publication, García Lorca was dead, killed by an anti-Communist death squad in the Spanish Civil War.  His work was banned under the fascist Franco until 1953.  Shostakovich, who himself had an ambivalent relationship with the Soviet regimes under which he lived and worked, included the poem, now called Malagueña, in his 14th Symphony, a song cycle based on poems of García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Rainer Maria Rilke and Wilhelm Küchelbecker, featuring a male basso, a female soprano and a chamber orchestra with percussion.  The piece premiered in Leningrad in 1969.  Many recordings of the second movement are far faster than I like, but the below (an excellent recording referencing a Swedish-Finnish soprano who appears to be depicted in the thumbnail, backed by a suspiciously unnamed orchestra-- possibly the Malmö Opera) is just right.

The recording ends abruptly, on purpose.  In performance it leads directly into the third movement (Allegro molto, Loreley, based on a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire).

Russian and Spanish lyrics are from http://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=33305,

English translation and Russian transliteration are from
https://www.naxos.com/sungtext/pdf/8.573132_sungtext.pdf

Malagueña / Малагэнья
Federico García Lorca / Anatoli Geleskul

Смерть
вошла и ушла
из таверны.
Черные кони
и темные души
В ущельях

гитары бродят.

Запахли солью
и жаркой кровью
Соцветья зыби нервной.
А смерть
все выходит и входит
И все не уйдот
из таверны.

Translation:

Death walks in and out of the tavern.
Death walks in and out of the tavern.
Black horses and sinister people
wander the deep paths of the guitar.
And there’s a smell of salt and women’s blood
on the febrile spikenards* along the coast.
Death walks in and out,
out of and into the tavern walks death.

The original:

La muerte
entra y sale
de la taberna.

Pasan caballos negros
y gente siniestra
por los hondos caminos
de la guitarra.

Y hay un olor a sal
y a sangre de hembra,
en los nardos febriles
de la marina.

La muerte
entra y sale,
y sale y entra
la muerte
de la taberna.

For non-Russian readers who would like to sing along or compare the Russian to the Spanish:

Smert’ voshla i ushla iz tavernï.
Smert’ voshla i ushla iz tavernï.
Chyornïye koni i tyomnïye dushi
V ushchel’yakh gitarï, brodyat.
Zapakhli sol’yu i zharkoy krov’yu
Sotsvet’ya zïbi nervnoy.
A smert’ vsyo ukhodit
I vsyo ne uydyot iz tavernï.

~~~~~~~~
* "Febrile spikenards" is not only my new favorite insult, it's a direct translation of the Spanish "nardos febriles" in García Lorca's original.  "Соцветья зыби нервной," the Russian counterpart to this phrase in Geleskul's translation, translates less specifically but equally poetically as "nervously swollen blossoms."