Magical Spain
@Magicalspain • 42,483 subscribers
Decoding the essence of Spain — Tradition | Art | Culture | Religion | History | Folklore | Nature
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1938, a village in Zamora. The Civil War has taken every man of fighting age to the front. A film crew from Burgos shows up. What they capture is one of the strangest anthropological documents to survive the war. An old woman dressed in black, the village's ROMANCERA (its ballad-keeper), opens by telling the camera that the shepherd who normally recites the opening verse "can't come; he's at the front." Then she hands the song off, line by line, to whoever's left: a poor widow, a mother with three small kids, a group of women spinning wool. The ballad is an archaic Spanish variant of Mambrú se fue a la guerra ('Marlborough is going off to war', from the French Malbrough s'en va-t-en guerre), an 18th-century song about a duke who never made it home, still being sung from memory two hundred years later, unscripted, by women whose own husbands hadn't made it home yet either.
Magical Spain126,457 次观看 • 1 个月前
