"Oceano" by Djavan
A song for the ghosted
“Assim que o dia amanheceu lá no mar alto da paixão / Dava pra ver o tempo ruir / Cadê você? Que solidão / Esquecera de mim”
“As the day dawned out on the high seas of passion, I could see the weather turning. Where are you? Such loneliness, had you forgotten about me”
English might be the worldwide lingua franca for pop music, rich in single-syllable-words. But Portuguese is the place for radiant, resonant vowels and soaring melodies if you just want to open up your face and sing. As you can tell above, directly translating the musical flow of these words to English would require a monumental effort, beyond my capabilities. Beyond those of real poets, too1. I’m just putting down the literal meaning of the words here, you’ll need to hear the song to feel how they sit musically.
Djavan is on the Mount Rushmore of Brazilian pop artists, although the list of candidates for something like that would be in the hundreds and such a range would stretch for miles, rivaling the pyramids in scale. He’s monumental, a jazzier counterpart to Gil/Caetano/Chico and the rest.
“Enfim, de tudo o que há na terra / Não há nada em lugar nenhum que vá crescer sem você chegar / Longe de ti tudo parou / Ninguém sabe o que eu sofri”
“In the end, of all that’s on the earth / There is nothing in no place that can grow until you arrive / Far from you everything stopped / No one knows how I suffered”
This is one of those songs that everybody sings along to, and it’s super played out. Kind of like if someone starts to play “Lean On Me” or “You’ve Got a Friend” at a party, people are tired of it but they’ll still sing along.
People relate to this song. The sadness is universal: who hasn’t been left out in the cold by a lover at some point? Trying to ignore that gnawing feeling in our heart? Picking up loose ends in futility, not able or ready to admit that we’ve been ghosted and are alone once more?
Djavan is spinning the coldest kind of abandonment into a melody that really goes places, encapsulating the feeling into a moment that connects everyone in their solitude. The verses are kind of low, setting the stage. Then comes the B section:
“Amar é um deserto e seus temores / Vida que vai na sela dessas dores não sabe voltar, me dá teu calor / Vem me fazer feliz porque eu te amo / Você deságua em mim, e eu, oceano / E esqueço que amar é quase uma dor”
“Love is a desert and its torments / A life in the saddle of these pains knows no return, give me your heat / Come make me happy for I love you / You melt into me, and I am ocean / And I forget that love is close to pain”
Here’s where the crowd joins in. The original track of this song is kind of a bland 80s radio production, but the live versions are where you can hear it. Caetano Veloso sang it in concerts too. The melody soars, it goes full torch song for a moment.
In America™ we tend to build songs around grooves, 12-bar blues, one chord jams, four chord jams, riffs… repeating patterns over which one must exert creativity to form a melody. Brazilian songs are not like that. The traditional patterns are there but there’s a huge amount of harmonic variety. Lots of altered ii-V circle progressions and creatively-resolved tensions, but mostly there’s a linear (or melodic) sense about the harmony.
In English that means: the chords tell a story too. In many Brazilian songs the melody and the chords will even tell a separate story from the lyric, creating a big space for individual interpretation. But this is one of those songs where the lyrics, melody and chords all sing together. “Oceano” does one thing, and it does it perfectly.
It’ll wring your sadness out of you like a sponge.
“Só sei viver se for por você”
“I can only live if it’s for you”
That’s not quite the literal translation, but I wanted to try to preserve a rare monosyllabic moment in a Brazilian song. Literally, the line means “I only know how to live if it’s for you”, not quite the suicide threat that it looks like.
Trying to preserve even a hint of the original musicality and meaning in an English translation from a Brazilian song is incredibly difficult. We’re not used to hearing melodies come out of our words in the same way. But an effort to understand even one song in its original habitat will open up whole worlds within us.
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For an eye-opener, go check out the original lyrics to “Garota de Ipanema” (by Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes) and compare them to “The Girl From Ipanema” (English version by Norman Gimbel). The translation barely hints at the original.