Dallas singer-songwriter Annie Clark, professionally known as St. Vincent, released an adaptation of her most recent album “All Born Screaming” last Friday. The new project, “Todos Nacen Gritando,” is a rerecording of the original featuring all new Spanish lyrics written by Clark and her friend, director Alan Del Rio Ortiz.
While Clark treads new ground with this Spanish-language release, it’s far from her first foray into experimental music. Ever since the beginning of her career, marked by the release of her debut album “Marry Me” in 2007, Clark has been a pioneer in pop construction, crafting a unique soundscape with surreal combinations of traditional instruments and electronics. Her writing tends to be sharp yet strange, eerily evoking the desires of the subconscious mind.
Clark put out hit after hit throughout the 2010s with albums like “Masseduction,” “St. Vincent” and “Strange Mercy.” This prolific decade had releases climb the charts while also making critics swoon with Clark’s intricate production and abstract lyricism.
“All Born Screaming,” solely composed by Clark, released in April of this year to much the same critical appraisal as her previous work. The album was hailed particularly for its tell-all approach to storytelling, dropping the makeup-laden and boisterous alter ego that Clark embodied in prior albums.
While the dense subject matter of “All Born Screaming” might have been crucial to its ascension to the Grammys, it also makes this album exceedingly difficult to translate. Other artists have tried similar feats of musical adaptation as one-off releases, like David Bowie’s rerecording of his single “Heroes” in German as “Helden” or Blur’s French rendition of its single “To the End.” Few have been as bold as to try to recreate the entirety of an album in another language, let alone officially publish it.
Clark dared to do both in undertaking the challenge of “Todos Nacen Gritando.” Crafted as a tribute to the Spanish-speaking fans she met on tour, Clark seems to have bitten off a little more than she could chew.
The first song on the album, “El Infierno Está Cerca,” sticks close to the original lyrics but has to make changes to align in meter and rhythm. This usually results in simplification, which is clearly apparent in the translation of the chorus, which loses almost all of its significance. Clark also cuts out a lot of the brilliant imagery from the original, leaving empty space in its place.
That void brings light to another glaring issue with this album: pronunciation. Clark is not a native Spanish speaker, and that much is made clear by her cadence and her approach to words, which can sound incredibly unnatural. Throughout the album, she makes myriad basic mistakes by mispronouncing Spanish vowels as their English equivalents and emphasizing the silent h in words like “hacer.” These errors would be recognizable to people with little knowledge of the language.
In other places, the attempt at translating a phrase literally has catastrophic results, like in the second song “Salvaje” where one of the lines reads “Extraño, ven a mi camino, te comeré” or, translated back to English, “Stranger, come to my path; I will eat you.” Here, trying to adapt the original too directly warps the lyric beyond repair, making it sound like Clark is literally commanding the subject to be eaten.
The next song, “Hombre Roto,” suffers from a similar issue, translating the lyric “to drive the nail” into “clavar el clavo,” an awkward phrasing that literally means “to nail the nail.”
Some songs have pure grammatical mistakes, like “Pulga,” which incorrectly uses the preposition “para” in the phrase “serás mío para la eternidad.” Even the title of “La Fruta Mas Dulce” features a typo, missing a critical accent on the word “mas” that completely changes the word’s meaning.
However, to focus on the technical or grammatical flaws would be to shortchange this project. Even if the lyrics are markedly different, “Todos Nacen Gritando” retains the excellent production of the original, soaring to the same stirring musical highs with wailing guitars and punchy synths. The brilliant orchestration on this project truly does transcend language barriers.
Clark’s singing is still characteristically thrilling in Spanish, hitting all the same notes with palpable energy. Heritage speakers attest that some songs are improved by the “intensity and contextualization” of experiencing them in their native tongue.
Therein lies the true purpose of “Todos Nacen Gritando.” This was not meant for bilinguals or grammaticians. While this release may be a footnote in the eyes of an American audience, to Spanish-speaking fans at St. Vincent concerts across Latin America and Spain, these translations are a tangible, if imperfect, conduit for Clark’s music.
Experimentalism has been at the forefront of Clark’s music from the beginning, and “Todos Nacen Gritando” is the ultimate experiment.
“That’s the only way you grow,” Clark said in an article for Smithsonian Magazine. “[When] you’re pushed out of your comfort zone, when you have to try something you haven’t done before.”
