E is for Eres Tu

Eres Tu (‘You are’) was sung by the Spanish group Mocedades, who performed it for the first time in 1973. I did not hear it, myself until years later. I first heard the melody for this on a Lawrence Welk show, of all places. A beautiful singer from Mexico, often featured on the show, sang the words, a few of which I caught. I loved the flow of the melody, the soaring climax, descending again, warmly, to a smile.
I took classes in Spanish when I was very young. It is a Romance language, and I can understand it if I see it written, but the words of a song generally escape me. …something about the night… The rest of the words escaped me. I made up my own to fit the melody, sang them when I felt like it, and stopped everything to listen when the song came on the air, as it still does from time to time.
And then along came the internet, and I adapted. Last year it occurred to me that I could maybe look up the song, learn what, exactly, it was about, and stop singing phonetic gibberish. As often happens when a smash hit song is translated into another language, the words didn’t make a lot of sense. It was obviously an issue with translation, not with the words themselves – the sense was lovely, a paean to all that a loved one was to the singer.
Last week, checking again, I found a very beautiful, flowing translation of the lyrics, which I share here with full credit to the translator:
So like a promise, it is you, it is you
So like a morning in the summer
The warmth of a smile, it is you, it is you
For me, for me, it is you
My hope and my yearning, it is you, it is you
So like a cool rain in my warm hands
So like a soft wind, it is you, it is you
For me, for me, it is you
The rhyme in my poem, it is you, it is you
Like a guitar sounds in the nighttime
The light on my horizon, it is you, it is you
For me, for me, it is you
I found a link on YouTube to one of the original performances. It is HERE . I like it even more.I also found a link to a fairly recent performance of that song, which is something of a classic in Spain, deservedly. Mocedades has worn well.