“El agua en sus cabellos”, a Antonio machado’s poem sung by Hilario Camacho

Hilario Camacho was one of the most personal and original Spanish songwriters. He begun in the collective from Madrid Canción del Pueblo (People’s Song), and his first EP, with musicalization of two poems of the Cuban poet Nicolás guillén, was in the way of the classic protest song (musical soberty, explicit –the more they might be- lyrics, etc.)… But after a travel across some countries of Europe, and after his military service, he started to do other kind of songs in 1972: more dylanesque folk-rock style and psichedely; a lyrics less “political”, but comitted, in his way, with reality (and anti-francoism). The most of Camacho’s lyrics are writen by his own hand (some of them, given to other friends singers), but he liked to musicalize some of the dearest poets by the Spanish songwriters too (he even was the one who adapated and musicalized poet Allen Ginsberg), as it was this case, of his 1975 album De paso (Passing through), where he sings this poem of Antonio Machado (from Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas 1907), in a sweet folk-rock style:

LXII

[El agua en sus cabellos]

Desgarrada la nube; el arco iris
brillando ya en el cielo,
y en un fanal de lluvia
y sol el campo envuelto.
    Desperté. ¿Quién enturbia
los mágicos cristales de mi sueño?
Mi corazón latía
atónito y disperso.
    …¡El limonar florido,
el cipresal del huerto,
el prado verde, el sol, el agua, el iris!
¡el agua en tus cabellos!…
Y todo en la memoria se perdía
como una pompa de jabón al viento.

LXII

[Water on her hair]

Teared up the cloud; the rainbow/ shining now in the sky,/ and in a bell jar of rain/ and sun the field is covered./ I woke up. Who is disturbing/ the magic crystals of my dream?*/ My heart was beating/ amazed and dispersed./ … The flowery lemon place,/ the cypress grove in the orchard,/ the green meadow, the sun, the water, the iris!/ the water on your hair!…/ And everything in the memory was losing away/ as a bubble in the wind.

Antonio Machado

* There are too little variations between the original version and Hilario’s. This is the only that deserves to be noticed: where Hilario sings “¿Quién enturbia ya mi sueño?”, so “Who is disturbing now my dream?”.