Milongas

by Edgardo Cozarinsky, Valerie Miles (Translator), Alberto Manguel (Introduction)

Overview

With an introduction by award-winning author Alberto Manguel, Milongas is Edgardo Cozarinsky's love letter to tango, and the diverse array of people who give it life.

From tango’s origins in the gritty bars of Buenos Aires, to milongas tucked away in the crypt of a London Church, a café in Kraków, or the quays of the Seine, Cozarinsky guides us through a shape-shifting dance’s phantasmagoric past.

In neighborhood dance halls vibrant and alive through the early hours of the morning, where young and old, foreign and native, novice and master come together to traverse borders, demographics, and social mores, “it is impossible to distinguish the dance from the dancer.”

As conspiratorial as he is candid, Cozarinsky shares the secrets and culture of this timeless dance with us through glimmering anecdote, to celebrate its traditions, evolution, and the devotees who give it life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953861108
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	12/14/2021
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.49(w) x 6.48(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Edgardo Cozarinsky is an Argentine writer and film director. Best known for his collection Urban Voodoo, an instant cult classic, with prologues by both Susan Sontag and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cozarinsky is also the author of the collection The Bride from Odessa, a novella, The Moldavian Pimp, and a large body of prize-winning short stories and essays. In 2018 Cozarinsky was awarded the prestigious Gabriel García Márquez short story prize for his story "en el ultimo trago nos vamos." As a film maker, his movies have received prizes and praise in the Jeu de Paume in Paris, and his film Lejos de dónde (Far from Where) won the Premio de la Academía Argentina de Letras in 2011.


Translator Bio: Valerie Miles is an American writer, editor and translator, and lives in Barcelona. In 2003, she co-founded Granta en español. She writes and reviews for the New York Times, the Paris Review, La Nación, La Vanguardia and el ABC, among others. She translates from the Spanish and Catalan and is a professor in the postgraduate program for literary translation at Pompeu Fabra University.

Read an Excerpt

Preface
Apparently (but etymologies are unreliable) the word “milonga”
derives from an African word meaning “word.” Jorge Luis Borges, in an early text, attributed the birth of the milonga and the tango to the arrival of African slaves: “the habanera mother of the tango, the candombe...” Since in its remote beginnings the milonga was sung,
the singing of words, an adjunct to the music, became the name by which the milonga was known. Popular singers, “payadores,”
played milongas on the guitar, to which later, at social gatherings,
the violin, the flute, and the piano were added. And yet, in the same way that the word “scribe” in ancient Mesopotamia concealed the fact that the main power of the scribe was not to write but to read,
to decipher the messages preserved on the clay tablet, the name
“milonga” concealed the fact that the milonga was above all not words but music.
Perhaps because music precedes words, or does not require them in order to exist, the succession of notes lends itself readily as a symbol of the emotional state of its listener or performer. Nothing in a certain beat, a certain rhythm, a certain tune carries an explicit emotive label: as in Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy, the emotion in the milonga lies in the performance or in the reception of that performance,
as the taste and color of an apple is in the tongue that tastes it and the eye that sees it.
A word or an image belong to a given vocabulary. Music adapts itself to the context given to it and acquires in the process a specific identity: melancholy, stirring, quarrelsome, sensuous. The tango,
especially for a “porteño,” for a native of Buenos Aires, can be all those things at once. The milonga, a term that can be used for the tango that is not merely played or sung but danced, is above all sensuous, even lascivious, certainly erotic. The tango can be naïve or mawkish; the milonga is never innocent. On the contrary, it is (in the eye and ear of the beholder) alluring, sexual, magnetic, suggesting an undercurrent of danger and possibly violence. “This book’s title is Milongas and not Tangos,” Cozarinsky sternly states. “Its focus is on the dance, not the music.” Music translated into movement,
channeled through movement outside the verbal realm. Style is,
according to Cozarinsky, the inescapable essence of milonga. “If we define style as the individual response of one body to the sound of the music,” he says, “then that style will express itself and continue being refined until it grows splendid in some cases, merely correct in others, or else remains dull. In milonga, the dance and the dancer are indistinguishable from the very first step.”
Cozarinsky traces the milonga (and in its wake, the tango)
throughout the twentieth century and across several continents.
He finds milongas danced in Kraków, London, Moscow, New York,
Tokyo, and discovers that the movements of the dance can be learned and brilliantly performed by unexpected people, from the couple that danced for the censorious Pope Pius X to that archetypal
Latin lover, Rudolfo Valentino, in The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse; from the belle époque icons Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ida
Rubinstein to the chauvinistic French President Raymond Poincaré
and his wife. Cozarinsky is not a distant observer: he is an experienced practitioner of the art, a well-known figure in the popular joints in which milonga is danced today in Buenos Aires. His essay has something of an autobiographical confession.
Unlike other dances, especially those born in the twentieth century, in the milonga youth and physical beauty are not weighty qualities. The dancers can be old and stout, short or tall: nothing matters except the skill with which their body conjures up or follows a style. If the dancers don’t follow the adamant rules of style, they are not dancing milonga. Traditionally, men and women fulfilled different roles in the dance; today, same-sex couples dancing a milonga have to agree on who is playing one role or the other.
Jack Lemmon in drag, with a rose between the teeth, stumbles around the dance floor in the arms of Joe E. Brown who has to correct Lemmon’s style: “Daphne, you’re leading again.”
National identities are imaginary constructs and yet, because of certain emotions associated with certain nationalities, music can acquire a kind of passport that assigns it to a particular country.
Country or city: milonga is the music of Buenos Aires, not
Argentina; it is “porteño,” endemic to Buenos Aires, and becomes
Argentinian only because Buenos Aires is the metonym for the nation. It is commonplace to say that the sound of a milonga makes a porteño weep with nostalgia. Cozarinsky makes it clear that the milonga is above all an existential condition, an ineffable, impassioned state of being.
Alberto Manguel
Lisbon, May 13 2021

Table of Contents

Preface ix

The First Move 3

Ceremonies of the Present

Salón Canning: Transfiguration 9

The Flaneur: Roaming 14

Music From a Lost Time: Necromancy 24

Nameless Milonga: Resurrection 32

Taking Minutes of Bygone Times

Anno Mirabilis 1913 43

Unfaithful Memories 52

Dubious Testimonies 59

1914 and Afterwards 66

"That Brothel Reptile" 75

Clandestine Tango 88

Odi et amo 100

Piringundines 110

Editorial Reviews

10/25/2021

Through wry anecdote and masterful observation, Argentine writer and film director Cozarinsky (Urban Voodoo) unspools the history of tango and its cultural influence across the globe. To the uninitiated, tango music and tango dance can seem interchangeable; but with this exploration of milongas, or tango gatherings, Cozarinsky makes a distinction and focuses on “the ways the dance is staged: the scenes, the rituals, and above all else, the characters.” With the companionable tenor of a humorous, well-informed raconteur, he traces tango dancing’s rise from the “slum yard bars of its origins” to the “nights of wild abandon” it’s brought to dance halls around the world, transporting readers from Argentina to England, Poland, and France. Both a wily spectator and avid participant, he sprinkles in moments of tango comedy—for instance, recounting how, at a milonga in Krakow, he invited a woman he assumed was a tango student to dance, only to be “flabbergasted by her expertise.” While these immersive snapshots are tantalizing, equally impressive is the research, notably demonstrated in his storied history of tango in Paris, where a couple once won a dance tournament “after dancing seventy-two tangos straight without collapsing.” Dance enthusiasts will find much to treasure. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Through wry anecdote and masterful observation, Argentine writer and film director Cozarinsky unspools the history of tango and its cultural influence across the globe . . . With the companionable tenor of a humorous, well-informed raconteur, he traces tango dancing’s rise . . . These immersive snapshots are tantalizing."
—Publishers Weekly

"Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky traces [tango's] fascinating journey through time and the seedy brothels and rough Argentine and European bars where the dance could be quite mannered or could spark with theatrical violence . . . Cozarinsky takes us through the ebbs and flows of the popularity of the tango, and also through a number of its evolutionary adaptive speciations . . . It would be very interesting to know what Cozarinsky thinks of the future of the tango now."
—Susan Smith Nash, World Literature Today

"Cozarinsky boils the complex and often contradictory history of the dance down to its discrete and essential germs, whose sparks linger in the imagination on account of neither their perceived historical significance nor their verifiable objectivity but their ability to engender delight in their retelling . . . [He] sketches a history of the milonga centered on passions, intrigues, and oddities . . .  A well-researched and deftly written catalogue of memories and primary source accounts."
—Jenny Wu, Full Stop

"The success in [Cozarinsky's] prose (as adeptly conveyed into English by Valerie Miles) lies in how well it captures the visual quality and physicality of the dancers and others in the small rooms where these dances take place in Krakow, London, Paris, and Buenos Aires . . . Cozarinsky’s history of milongas is concise, briskly paced, crammed with facts and telling, interesting examples."
—Tom Bowden, Bookbeat

 "Cozarinsky, who is a filmmaker turned writer, or a writer turned filmmaker, has produced here an album of postcards made of words. But his postcards might well take visual form...a kind of lived literature"
—Susan Sontag of Cozarinsky's book Urban Voodoo

"Very innovative for its time...Urban Voodoo anticipated the trend of mixing essay with fiction, and in so doing advanced new and interesting directions for literature. It seemed to be made of stories that were like essays and essays that were like stories."
—Enrique Vila-Matas

"magnificent... In the title story, he achieves more in a few pages than most writers manage in three or four hundred...The Bride from Odessa feels like the summation of a life spent reading and reflecting on experience, condensed into 160 pages."
—Josh Lacey, The Guardian

"A book that speaks volumes about 'the ghostly existence of émigrés; one that haunts the reader's imagination."
—Kirkus Reviews on The Bride from Odessa  

"His novels and stories...are full of hidden, half-told histories, subtle references to names, tunes, places that may mean little at first but which are imbued with the melancholy of tango, the hopelessness of exile and the allure of the exotic; exciting when seen from the distance of time, tawdry and deceptive up close."
—Patrick O'Connor, Literary Review  

"The winning work is, above all, a book written with wonderful narrative craft, with deep roots in an ancient literary tradition and a remarkable intellectual solidity. Among his themes are existential identity, old age and the unreliability of memories, all elaborated upon by Cozarinsky in a singular way, lending them deep and necessary literary dimension."
—Gabriel García Márquez Spanish-American Short Story Award Jury  

 "A master of the image and the word"
—La Nación  

 "Cozarinsky conveys the sense of urgency and nostalgia that accompanies messages that seem to come from the past or from a place that does not exist."
—Ricardo Piglia  

 "Occasionally you come on someone you have never read before and discover that the work is so good it dispels ennui and restores your faith in imaginative literature. The Bride from Odessa is just such a book..."
—The Scotsman  

"The finest book I have read for a long time."
—Chris Maker, Libération  

"He creates a shadowy world of uprooted characters whose lives are shaped by the history of the 20th century...Alive, moving and perceptive."
—Daily Telegraph  

"Cozarinsky writes superbly of exile, love, and death in the Argentine capital, and we are lucky to have him."
—The Independent  

 "A writer of exceptional sensibility and austere aesthetic principles, Cozarinsky refuses to contrive beyond what history offers merely to sate our cheap hunger for beginnings and endings. The Moldavian Pimp leaves us with a "strange sense of destiny", and - Borgesian provocations aside - a strange sense of unfinished fictional business."
—The Guardian  

"...fiery intellectual strength and a powerful originality. La novia de Odessa, in its deceptively quiet manner, belongs on the same shelf as those other sceptical masterpieces, the novels of Joseph Roth and the memoirs of Julien Green."
—Alberto Manguel: post-face to The Bride from Odessa.

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