“Tem gente com fome” “The people are hungry”

Source: Thiago Piccoli, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

This poem was written in 1944 by Solano Trindade (1908-1974), a militant Communist and black rights activist, who was also a poet, a painter, an actor, and a movie maker. It was censored immediately by the Estado Novo dictatorship. In 1975, the group “Secos & Molhados” (literally “Dry goods and wet goods” but really “Groceries”) was prohibited from releasing a musicalized version by the military dictatorship. It was finally released in 1979 by the most famous member of that group, Ney Matogrosso, on his album “Seu Tipo” (“Your Type”). (Ney omits the list of stations that the train stops at in the middle of the poem.)

The title and the repeated line literally translates as “There are people going hungry” but the rhythm of the Portuguese, as noted in the poem, seems to imitate the sound of a train. So I have translated it as “The people are hungry” which has the same chugging meter as the original.

Listen to Ney’s recent version.
Listen to Ney’s original version.

“The people are hungry”
Dirty train from Leopoldina
Running, running, seems to say
The people are hungry
The people are hungry
The people are hungry

Caxias station
Again running
Again saying
The people are hungry
The people are hungry
The people are hungry

Vigário Geral
Lucas
Cordovil
Brás de Pina
Penha Circular
Penha Station
Olaria
Ramos
Bom Sucesso
Carlos Chagas
Triagem, Mauá
Dirty train from Leopoldina
Running, running, seems to say
The people are hungry
The people are hungry
The people are hungry

So many sad faces
Wanting to get to
Some destination
In some place

Only in the stations
When it’s stopping
It starts to say
If the people are hungry
Give them food
If the people are hungry
Give them food
If the people are hungry
Give them food

But the air break, all authoritarian
Tells the train to shut up