My use of the word “discovered” will seem odd to a Brazilian reader; Caetano is Brazil’s most celebrated musician—and one of the country’s most famous citizens. The thirty or so albums he has released since 1966 define the musical era that follows bossa nova. They span the radical innovations of Tropicália (the 1960s artistic and cultural movement in which he was a prime mover), the military dictatorship that suppressed it and forced him and his fellow-tropicalista, Gilberto Gil, into exile in England from 1969 to 1972, and the three further decades of productivity in music, film and literature that he—and Gil as well—have enjoyed since that time.

If there is a single figure who personifies the spirit of modern Brazilian popular music, with its rhythmic eclecticism and instrumental complexity, its cultural depth and lyrical sophistication, it is surely Caetano. But I knew none of this in 1986. All I knew was on the sleeve of a record—it was the last days of vinyl—and in a language I was just beginning to understand.

Much of the written Portuguese I came to learn was gleaned in this way, from albums bought at stalls in street markets, compilations of hits by the stars of MPB—em-i-peh-beh—Musica Popular Brasileira, recorded in the classic era of Brazilian pop music. The lyrics were printed on the sleeves of the records, so I began to be able to separate one word from another in the songs I was listening to. I scanned the hieroglyphs on these recordings of Os Grandes Compositores do Brasil for clues to the new country, openings to the lusotropical world.

I was in luck. This was the right place to start. If there is a body of contemporary music and song in the world that is ready to be set against the hegemony of anglophone pop, it is MPB, with its precursors in Brazilian regional folk music, and descendants today in the urban dance sounds of the clubs and concert halls of Salvador and Rio and São Paulo. Despite its worldwide reputation, much of this music, both the old and the new, is only now being heard by audiences outside the Portuguese-speaking world. My nascent record collection back then featured artists already considered timeless in Brazil—João Gilberto, Dorival Caymmi, Tom Jobim, Elis Regina—names redolent of this parallel universe of sound. And Caetano took his place among them.

Miracles of the people

The song playing on the radio when I came down to breakfast my first or second day at the Anglo-Americano was called “Milagres do Povo”, Miracles of the People. It was the theme song of a then-recent television series based on a novel by the Bahian novelist Jorge Amado.

“Quem é ateu,” the song begins, “e viu milagres como eu…”

At this point I could barely parse the lyrics of the song, but the high tenor voice had a clarity and authority that stood out from the ubiquitous sweetness and rhythmicity of the tunes on the playlist of the local FM station. Later I worked out how the words went, and what they signified. The subject of “Milagres do Povo” was the pantheon of African gods that are worshipped in the terreiros of Camdomblé, places such as Ilê Axé Opô Aganjú, where I was spending my weekends.

“Atheists who’ve seen miracles, as I have done,” Caetano sings:

Know that where God is not, the gods
Don’t disappear; they multiply.
The gods don’t give up,
For the sovereign heart, the Lord of all,
Cannot be confined by slavery
Cannot be confined by No.
So much Yes can never be confined:
The dancing Yes, the Yes of sex—that glorious Yes
Arching across our history…

The refrain that followed was useful for a student of Portuguese, serving as it did as a sung exercise in a range of the vowel sounds in the language. “Ojuobá ia,” it went,

Ojuobá ia
Lá e via
Ojuobahia

Ojuobá came here
And saw this clearly
Ojuobahia

The bridge—the musical passage between verses in the heart of the song—invoked the deities of Candomblé by name. These were the orixás, the gods from West Africa whose names and attributes I encountered at the festivities in the temple beyond the airport.

“Xangó manda chamar,” it went. “Obatalá guia…”

Xangó sends for him,
Obatalá becomes his guide,
Mama Oxum weeps
Tears of happiness,
Petals fall from Iemanjá,
Laughter from Iãnsa-Oiá.

It took me many mornings at the Anglo-Americano—and nights at Candomblé ceremonies—to grasp the full weight of meaning of “Milagres do Povo”. The song celebrates the reinvention of African belief systems by descendants of slaves in the new world. In Salvador this is a living history. As the months passed I came to understand the extent of the influence of the Candomblé pantheon on the poets and singers of Bahia. These African divinities—Obatalá, Oxum, Iemanjá and a dozen more—ruled over popular music in the Bahian cultural universe as Greek and Roman deities had done over the art and literature of Renaissance Europe. At the same time, for practitioners of Candomblé and other African-derived religions, the orixás were not just symbols. They were living gods and goddesses: the beat of the city was shot through with the drumming patterns used to invoke them in Saturday-night ceremonies.

A democratic mulato

All this was—and is—a source of profundity and vitality in Bahian music, a deep well of culture that is shared by Bahianos of African descent with their fellow city-dwellers, and with other Brazilians. Like most Bahian artists and writers, Caetano was an aficionado of Candomblé; this cultural hybridity was something that he personified. In one of his songs he describes himself as mulato nato, mulato democrático.

I’m a native-born mulato
In the broadest sense
A democratic mulato from the coastal zone

His song “Miracles of the People” also made reference to someone I’d come to know in Salvador, the venerable French photographer and ethnologist, Pierre Verger. Verger had been living in the city for many years, latterly in a low-income bairro called Vila América. He was extensively involved in Afro-Brazilian religion, both as chronicler and a practitioner, and held office in an old-established house of Candomblé in the city, where he had been given one of the grandiloquent titles accorded to persons of influence by shrewd Candomblé priests and priestesses. “Ojuobá” was Verger’s title, “Eye of the King” in Yoruba. Hence Caetano’s punning reference in the song to Verger and the city where he dwelt:

Ojuobá came here
And saw this clearly
Ojuobahia

Verger was also a patron of the temple beyond the airport where I spent much of my time. The pai-de-santo there—the priest of the temple—Balbino Daniel de Paula, was a friend and erstwhile protégé of his. It was at Balbino’s terreiro, in fact, that I first met Verger. Later, graduating from the Anglo-Americano, I spent some months as Verger’s guest in Salvador, staying in a small house behind his own. Here I passed the time acquainting myself more closely with the African heritage of the city: taking instruction in capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art that has since become a worldwide movement, reading the books in Verger’s library—and listening to music on the radio.

There was no choice about that: in Vila América the neighbours played music at all hours. From time to time songs from Caetano’s back catalogue would come on the air, songs that mentioned places in the city, suburbs of Salvador with African names like Calabar or Curuzu. One of these songs was called “Beleza Pura” (Perfect Loveliness).

“Não me amarra dinheiro não…” the song begins:

It’s not money I go for—
It’s good looks.
Not money, but
A dark-skinned girl
Not cash,
But flesh and blood
Not money but
A black girl from Curuzu—
Pure loveliness—
It’s not money I go for.
It’s style…
Not money, but
A good-looking guy from Badauê
Pure loveliness…

Those good-looking guys from Badauê (the name of one of the city’s carnival groups) and dark-skinned girls from the nearby bairro—neighbourhood—of Curuzu were not hard to find on the streets and beaches of Salvador. In the rich hour of light in the late afternoon, just before dusk, with the setting sun gilding the skin of passers-by—on Fridays especially, when many of the inhabitants of the city dress in white in honour of Oxalá, father of the orixás—at that hour in Salvador a transcendent beauty filled the air.

“Poetry is to prose as love is to friendship”

Around this time I met Caetano in person. I was introduced to him by Paulo César de Souza, a young Bahian intellectual, translator of Nietzsche and Freud. We were at a party with João José Reis, a historian of slavery and professor at the University. It was Friday, the day of Oxalá, and Caetano was dressed in white, a slight figure, making conversation quietly in a corner of the room.

It was clear from the company he kept that Caetano—unlike any popular musician I had met in Europe or the United States—had a serious interest in literature and ideas. Confirming this, the memoir he subsequently wrote, Verdade Tropical (Tropical Truth) is filled with references to modernist poetry and contemporary European and American philosophy, blended inimitably with Brazilian cultural history.

In Brazil, popular culture and high culture have always been closer together than in the English-speaking world. It was a modernist poet, Vinicius de Moraes, who wrote the original lyrics to “Garota de Ipanema” (The Girl from Ipanema) and Chico Buarque, Caetano’s contemporary, doyen of the new bossa nova, is the author of a clutch of avant-garde novels. Caetano is unique, however, in his combination of literary and demotic, lyrical and metaphysical, and in the degree of cultural self-awareness he brings to the pop idiom.

“Gosto de sentir a minha língua roçar / A língua de Luis de Camões,” he sings teasingly—and raps—in “Língua”.  “I like to feel my tongue as it touches / the tongue of Luis de Camões.” This is a song that eulogizes Camões and Fernando Pessoa, the greatest poets in the Portuguese language, and the Brazilian prose writer Guimarães Rosa. The lyric plays on the two Portuguese words for “to be”—ser, signifying a permanent state, and estar, a transient condition—and the different modes of being they reflect.

In fact the word roçar, as Caetano pointed out to me later, when I showed him my initial English version of his song, means something earthier than “touch”—more like frottage. The translation, he suggested, would be better this way:

I like to feel my tongue as it rubs up against
The tongue of Luis de Camões.
I like to hear ser and estar…
I like the person in Pessoa,
The scent of roses in Guimarães Rosa.
And I know that poetry is to prose
As love is to friendship…

Some years after “Língua”, Caetano recorded an album called “Livro” (Book). The title track of this album, “Livros ” (in the plural), refers to his childhood in the small town of Santo Amaro, an hour by road from Salvador, in the 1940s and 1950s, when books were still uncommon objects, signs of the world beyond. (The song itself builds on a literary reference, a poem by the Bahian writer Castro Alves, “O Livro e A América”, “The Book and America”).  The lyrics are characteristically energetic and ambivalent.

“Os livros,” Caetano sings, “são objectos transcendentes. / Mas podemos amá-los do amor táctil.”

Books transcend all time and place
But the love we give them is the love of hands,
The same as we give a pack of cigarettes
We tame them, grow them behind glass
On shelves, in cages; lay them on fires
Or throw them from windows
(So we don’t jump out ourselves).
Or worse, to show we hate them
We write another book
Filling pages with vain words
Bookcases with confusion.

A brush with Brazilian politics

Caetano’s songs guided my nascent understanding of Brazil. Many aspects of national life were reflected in them—politics, culture, history, the spirit of place. He had written himself into the landscape, into the heart of the country: Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo—Caetano’s songs about these cities are among his best-known compositions. They are part of Brazilian collective memory. Listening to them was like coming to Britain for the first time and hearing the Beatles, or the United States and hearing Bob Dylan.

Later, when I returned to Britain, I found that the memory of Brazilian music did not fade, nor my interest in the mysteries of Afro-Brazilian religion. In the 1980s, as LPs gave way to CDs, I returned to Brazil numerous times, coming home on each occasion with new recordings and a increasing grasp of their meaning.

In 1990, however, the personal and political converged, and my visits to Brazil came to an end. That year I travelled to Brasília to interview the newly-elected President, Fernando Collor de Mello, for a profile that appeared in the London Sunday Times. Collor was a youthful and glamorous figure whose popularity was at its height, but the piece I wrote about him was skeptical, drawing attention to a number of incipient scandals in which he was involved. In Brazil the article caused a furore. It was denounced in many sections of the press (the same papers seized the opportunity to run lengthy summaries of the critical parts of the piece); President Collor sued for libel; the Sunday Times hastily settled out of court.

Friends of mine in Brazil found the affair a source of amusement—it was not news to them that their politicians were corrupt. Some suggested, though, that it might not be politic to return to the country just then. They reminded me that President Collor’s father, also a politician, had shot and killed one of his rivals on the floor of the Senate itself and yet contrived, by invoking senatorial privilege, to retain both his seat and his liberty.

Eighteen months passed. Then President Collor’s misdeeds—greater than I or most others had imagined—were spectacularly confirmed. In a long interview in Veja (Brazil’s equivalent of Time Magazine, or Newsweek) the President’s own brother gave a detailed low-down on his moral failings and the extraordinary degree of financial corruption in his administration. It was too much even for Brazilians, long accustomed to the rapacity of their political class. Soon afterwards Collor resigned from the presidency under threat of impeachment. He was barred from politics for eight years.

It was a year or two before I went back to Bahia. When I did, I was gratified to be shown an item that had appeared in A Tarde, the city’s leading newspaper, which ran as follows:

Who still remembers John Ryle? Let us refresh your memory: he was the first journalist to make concrete accusations against ex-President Collor de Mello. The British newspaper that published the article had to pay a heavy fine. Would it not now be just for the Brazilian government to return the money?

As far as I know the Sunday Times never asked for its money back. Nor did they report on the fall of President Collor. I have not written for them since.

Before I had a chance to go back to Brazil, Pierre Verger, the French photographer and ethnologist who had been my mentor and host, died in Salvador, at the age of 93. In London, I sat down to write about his life. I returned to the translations of Caetano I had made years earlier. With a blank screen before me, I imagined myself in Salvador in the 1940s, the time when Verger first arrived there from France, and Caetano was growing up in the interior, in Santo Amaro. From one of the websites featuring Caetano’s songs, I downloaded the Portuguese lyrics of “Milagres do Povo”, the song I had first heard in the Anglo-Americano in Salvador five years before, and began again to put it in English.

The second of the two verses of “Milagres do Povo” goes like this: “Obá é no xaréu / Que brilha prata luz no céu…”

The spirit of Obá is in the fish of the sea,
Flashing silver as heaven’s light shines.
This is the thing the Africans knew:
That victory lies with those who can see
How to rise above suffering.
And all of this was carried here
By the survivors of the slave ships.
So the true discoverers of Brazil
Were these Africans. Finding themselves
Face-to-face with brutality
They still performed miracles of faith
Here in the far west.

Who’s an atheist now?

Quem é ateu?  The last line of Caetano’s song echoes the first, but this time it’s a question. Who can really be an atheist? he asks. In what sense can you be an atheist, when you draw your inspiration from a culture of faith? The suppleness in Caetano’s thinking, where pantheism performs a pas de deux with reason, was evident in the song. To understand it properly, I needed to make a written translation. This led me back to Caetano’s earlier songs, and then to making translations of the work of other Brazilian poets and singers: Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto and Vinicius de Moraes.

The work of translation

Not long after, towards the end of the year 2000, at a party in London given by my neighbours Melissa North and Tchaik Chassy, I met Caetano again: the same slight, elegant figure, dapper in a high-buttoned black suit, now with touches of grey in his hair. He was accompanied by his then wife, Paula Lavigne. She, it turned out, had recently completed a documentary film about Pierre Verger, including the last interview with him, conducted the day before he died.

I mentioned that I had made a translation of “Milagres do Povo”. A few days afterwards, at Caetano’s request, I e-mailed him the translation. Towards the end of the year he wrote back to ask if I would be interested in translating the lyrics for the US version of his new album, Noites do Norte (Northern Nights).

Some reviewers in Brazil had been tepid about this album, but to me it had the ring of vintage Caetano, rekindling the delight I took in his music and leading me back further into the cultural history of Brazil. Many of the songs in the album spring from the hybrid African and European culture of Salvador and the heritage of slavery. The title itself comes from a work by Joaquim Nabuco, a leading nineteenth-century Brazilian abolitionist. On one track, over an orchestral backing, Caetano recites this striking passage from Nabuco:

For a long time slavery will remain the national characteristic of Brazil. It spread a great smoothness across these vast solitudes of ours; it left the first imprint on our virgin soil, an imprint that was retained; it expanded here as though it were a natural, living religion with its own myths and legends and marvels; it breathed into the land its childish spirit, its sadness without substance, its tears without bitterness, its unfocussed silence, its random joy and inconsequential happiness…  It is the indefinable sigh half-heard in our moonlit northern nights.

Like “Milagres do Povo” this passage contains a subtle balance of feeling, acknowledging —without endorsing—the profound and enduring effects of slavery on the Brazilian body politic. Caetano, who has composed songs in English and Italian, and translated lyrics from English into Portuguese, was exercised over the precise rendering of this passage in translation. He was more concerned about this, in fact, than the translations of the lyrics of his own songs. He made numerous suggestions for improvements. During the winter months in London I would get up in the early morning dark to work on this and the other songs on the album, e-mailing them to him five thousand miles away in the height of the Bahian summer. Swiftly he would write back, questioning some points of the translation, accepting others.

The new album was not all about the Brazilian past. There were songs in a purely lyrical mode. In “Sou seu Sabiá” (I’m Your Songbird), the staccato rhythm in the last lines of each verse replicates the trilling of the bird in the title, the sabiá, the red-breasted thrush that is national symbol of Brazil.

Sou seu sabiá
Não importa onde for
Vou te catar
Te vou cantar
Te vou, te vou, te vou, te dar

I’m your songbird
No matter where you go
I’ll seek you out
I’ll sing to you
I’ll go, I’ll give, I’ll go, I’ll give to you

It was a pleasure to listen to that voice again. For me Caetano had come to embody the allure of the language itself. I thought about the mornings at the Anglo-Americano many years before, a time of innocence and longing, before my attraction to the country was muted by experience—before I’d been touched by the pitch of Brazilian politics—a time when I dreamed only of entering the lusophone world, of being visited by Pentecostal tongues of flame.

The miracle of Pentecost

There’s a sense in which the miracle of Pentecost really does happen, though it does not come in tongues of flame. It’s more like a glowing ember, a slow-burning thing, nurtured by breath—by speech itself—little by little, until it gives you light enough to find your way in a new language. Translating Caetano was an opportunity to rekindle this light, to recover my memory of the city and the country and the language he personified, to experience again the swooning sensation of years before, in Salvador, when those boys from Badauê and girls from Curuzu cruised the streets in the evening hour—when the sounds of the city were cries of love.

Caetano had been down that road years before, exploring the idea of translation in a song called “Trilhos Urbanos”, The Tracks of the City. In it he sings of streets and tramlines and lines of verse that all lead back to old times, to the cityscape of childhood. In this song the act of translation becomes a metaphor for memory itself, for the redemption of the past.

Sitting at my desk in London, on those cold, dark, winter mornings, with Northern Nights on the sound system and the distant rumble of trains on the Hammersmith and City line, the lyrics seemed apposite enough:

Bonde da trilhos urbanos
Vão passando os anos
E eu não te perdi,
Meu trabalho é te traduzir

A streetcar runs on the tracks of the city
The years are passing by
And I’ve not lost you
My work is to translate you