Covering Dylan: The Spanish Rocker Eva Amaral

So a few weeks after concluding that Bob Dylan was a lost cause for Spanish speaking audiences, I woke up to Radio Zamora playing a Spanish version of Hard Rain that features the same top-shelf passion as the original, all while actually sounding better.

Turns out the song is a very new creation from the Spanish group Amaral. Called “Llegará la tormenta,” it does not directly translate the song, but instead creates a kind of serious funhouse mirror version of it. Very close variations on a theme by Dylan, you could call it.

And really, the artist probably had no choice. Translating expressions is difficult, and Hard Rain is full of them. Something direct would probably sound absurd, and hence “hard rain’s a gonna fall” becomes “it will arrive the storm that announces the sky.”

But even that is about as direct as it gets. While lines like “I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains” are left pretty much intact (Caí entre la bruma de doce montañas), the Amaral version features a line that translates back to English as “the voice of a clown covered in blood.” Apparently, “I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children” just didn’t sound that good in the Spanish.

And speaking of Spanish, you can even hear her accent. “Triste cancion” becomes “trithte canthion.”

But that is neither here nor there. The point is that Spanish speakers now have a beautiful excerpt from the Dylan universe to listen to, and even you English types would do well to check it out. Here’s the video, and the words, and the original words.