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19 días y 500 noches — Joaquín Sabina: vocabulary & quiz · Verbomatico

19 días y 500 noches

by Joaquín Sabina

Language: Spanish
Released: 1999
Genre: cantautor
Level: C2-
Difficulty score: 1901
Duration: 4:43

How to study this song

The card for “19 días y 500 noches” is built from 141 study entries at C2-: 81 Spanish words, 13 adjectives and 47 verb forms. The glossary is the place to begin — peces, hielo and copa are the song’s keywords. This one leans on its verbs: 47 distinct forms against 13 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the words on their own are not the problem — it is the way they are put together that takes the work.

The words of this song, in several languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

ES	EN	IT	FR	PT	NL	DE
peces	fish (plural)	pesci	poissons	peixes	vissen	Fische (Pl.)

Adjectives

ES	EN	IT	FR	PT	NL	DE
alta	high, held high (f.)	alta	haute	alta	hoog	hoch, erhoben (f.)

Verb forms

ES	EN	IT	FR	PT	NL	DE
duró	it lasted	è durato	a duré	durou	duurde	es dauerte

What this song teaches you

Level · C2-

Vocabulary words: 81
Adjectives: 13
Word combos: 13
Expressions: 14
Verb forms: 47
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«19 días y 500 noches» is the song that gives its name to the twelfth studio album by the Spanish singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina, released on 6 September 1999 by BMG and Ariola. The record was produced by the Argentine musician Alejo Stivel, who had been the singer of the band Tequila, and it was recorded over roughly six months, between December 1998 and June 1999. It runs for about seventy-four minutes across thirteen tracks, and the title song sits second in the running order, right after the opening number. Sabina was fifty years old when it came out, and the album is usually described in Spain as the moment when his writing turned inward: less rock, more acoustic guitars, rumba, tango and the sound of a late-night bar.

The song has one of the strangest origin stories in modern Spanish pop, and it is documented by the people involved. Sabina was not writing it for himself. He had been commissioned to produce a rumba for Siempre Así, a cheerful and hugely popular group from Seville, and this is what he handed over. Their singer, Rafa Almarcha, read the words and told him plainly that he could not sing them: the piece talked about drink, gambling, cocaine and self-destruction, and that was the opposite of the sunny, family-friendly image the group had built. Sabina answered that he liked it too much to throw it away, that his producer liked it as well, and that he would record it himself. Years later Siempre Así went back and recorded their own version, which is how a song written to order for somebody else became the best-known thing its author ever wrote.

What the song tells is very simple, and the way it tells it is not. A relationship ends. The woman does not make a scene; she laughs, says hello and goodbye, and leaves in a taxi, blowing him two kisses on the way out. He is the one left kneeling. The rest of the lyric is his slide back into everything he had left behind: the bars, the card tables, the sherry, the company of people he does not respect and does not like. He insists he is not asking for forgiveness, because she no longer cares enough to grant it. Then comes the line the whole country remembers, the arithmetic of the title: the affair was short and getting over it was not. Nineteen days against five hundred nights. That asymmetry, and the fact that the long half is counted in nights rather than days, is the whole song in two numbers.

For a learner of Spanish this is a demanding but unusually rewarding text. The vocabulary is wide and very concrete — a vanity case, frost, a slammed door, costume jewellery, a brotherhood, a religious procession, a fairground-cheap version of something — and Sabina reaches for words that a textbook will never teach you. The grammar covers a lot of ground too: the preterite carries the story (she left, she threw, he went back, he took), the imperfect sets the background (they were right, he used to want), the conditional appears in a hypothetical vow, and the present subjunctive turns up after a clause about a future moment. There are gerunds everywhere, including one with a pronoun stuck on the end, and infinitives with object pronouns attached, one of them stacked three verbs deep in a line about wanting to want to love her.

Did you know?

The song was written to order for somebody else. Sabina had been asked to supply a rumba for the Sevillian group Siempre Así, and this is what he delivered. Their singer, Rafa Almarcha, told him he could not sing it, because the subject matter clashed head-on with the group’s cheerful image. Sabina kept it, recorded it himself, and it became his best-known song.

Of the thirteen tracks on the album, the title song is one of the few that Sabina signs alone. Most of the record is co-written: Antonio Oliver appears on five songs, Pancho Varona and Antonio García de Diego on others, the Cuban singer Pablo Milanés wrote the music for one, and the producer Alejo Stivel himself shares a credit on another.

The last track of the album features the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas, a friend of Sabina’s and one of the great voices of ranchera. Her presence is part of why the record sounds as Latin American as it does Spanish.

The casino the narrator is thrown out of is a real place: Torrelodones, in the hills north-west of Madrid, has had a casino since the early 1980s, and for years it was the one most associated with Madrid nightlife. The dry sherry named in the same verse is also real, a fino brand from Jerez de la Frontera.

Sabina, born in Úbeda in the province of Jaén in 1949, had spent part of the 1970s in exile in London, having left Spain on a false passport after taking part in anti-Franco activity as a student. He sang in pubs there until the end of the dictatorship allowed him to return.

Two years after this album, in 2001, Sabina suffered a stroke and stopped performing for four years. That pause makes «19 días y 500 noches» the last record of his first, uninterrupted run — one reason Spanish critics tend to treat it as the summing-up of everything he had been doing since 1980.

The title has outgrown the song. It has been borrowed for a documentary film released in 2008 and it is quoted in Spanish journalism as a shorthand for any wildly lopsided piece of emotional arithmetic, usually by people who could not tell you another line of the lyric.