Leonardo Buffardi brings Pino Daniele to Rio de Janeiro The musicologist presents a study at the ARLAC/IMS Congress in Rio on the Brazilian rewriting of "E po' che fa'"

Neapolitan musicologist and researcher Leonardo Buffardi has presented a study in Rio de Janeiro on the relationship between E po' che fa', released by Pino Daniele in 1982, and Bem que se quis, the Brazilian version recorded by Marisa Monte in 1989 with Portuguese lyrics by Nelson Motta. His paper, titled Ressonância epistêmica entre pucundria e saudade: Pino Daniele e Marisa Monte na reescrita transatlântica como mediação cultural, was selected by the scientific committee of the 7th ARLAC/IMS Congress, scheduled from August 10 to 14. Buffardi starts from a question: if a work changes its language, lyrics, arrangement and context, to what extent can it still be recognizable?

The analysis starts from two untranslatable terms, the Neapolitan pucundria and the Brazilian saudade, in which memories and experiences of emigration, distance and absence shared by Naples and Brazil have accumulated over time. The two words do not carry the exact same meaning, and Buffardi's thesis is not that pucundria directly translates into saudade: what happens instead is what the researcher calls epistemic resonance, a dialogue between sensibilities that recognize each other without ever overlapping.

The credit goes to music itself, because the song, moving from one continent to the other, creates a "contact zone" between the two cultures and becomes an "epistemic translation", capable of making shareable a feeling that words alone could not convey. To read this passage, Buffardi argues, musicology cannot limit itself to historical and technical aspects, but must engage in dialogue with philosophy, linguistics and cultural studies.