Cambalache / Flea Market

I love this tango! Like a good porteña (citizen of Buenos Aires) I already love any tango, but this in particular depicts the feeling of the citizen ferociously criticizing the social reality that has to confront daily.
Wrote by Enrique Santos Discépolo in 1934 for the movie "Soul of Large Accordeon" during the called 'infamous decade' right away got attached to the people's intelligence that lived its verses in their own flesh and that's why it was banned during all the coup d'etat.

An appealing quality is that there are several versions of the lyrics of this great tango. Were changed the characters that are mentioned in the lyrics in accordance with the time that is sing, to emphasize that quality of everlasting, of keeping always in force and stuck to reality although have passed more than 70 years that it was written.
So for example appears Arturo Toscanini, Jose Maria Gatica, Ringo Starr, John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher or Jose Maria Aznar.

Thanks to this tango we know the famous phrase "The Bibble and the Water Heater" that we usually use to say something that covers too much and gather together all the things in a single pile.
And is this tango the one that also helped to 'internationalize' some words of our unrefined lunfardo like *Chorro* or *Afanar*.

Surely the most known version if Julio Sosa's one, though has been recorded also by Caetano Veloso, Nacha Guevara, Roberto Goyeneche, Julio Iglesias, León Gieco, Joan Manuel Serrat and Andrés Calamaro among others.
Here I post three versions, with three different singers and three modified lyrics; besides, of course, the three translations in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Enjoy!


That the world was and will be junk,
I already know...
On year five hundred and six
And on the two thousand too!
That always have had taffers,
Machiavellis and ripped off,
Happy and bitter people,
Values and imitations...
But that the twentieth century
Is a display
Of rude evilness
Nobody can deny it anymore.
We live tumbling in a meringue
And in the same mud
All groped...

Today it happens it's the same
Being decent than a traitor...!
Ignorant, wise, tea-leaf,
Generous or swindler!
All is the same! Nothing is better!
It's the same a dumb
Than a great professor!
Don't have failing grades nor ranking,
The immoral have matched us.
If one lives in the faking
And other steals in his ambition,
It's the same if it's a priest,
Mattress-maker, clubs' king,
Sassy or stowaway...

What a lack of respect,
What an abuse to reason!
Anyone is a gentleman!
Anyone is a thief!
Mixed with Stavisky goes Don Bosco
And "La Mignon,"
Don Chicho and Napoleon,
Carnera and San Martin...
Just like in the disrespectful stained-glass window
Of the flea markets
Life has mixed up
And wounded by a rivet-less saber
See the Bible crying
Against a water heater.

Twentieth century, flea market
Problematic and feverish!
The one who doesn't cry, doesn't get fed,
And the one who doesn't pinched is a jerk.
Go ahead! Keep it up!
That there in the oven
We are gonna meet!
Don't think anymore,
sit down aside.
That nobody cares
If you were born honest.
Because it's the same the one who works
Night and day, like an ox
Than whom lives from others,
Than whom kills or cures
Or is outlaws.