Spoken and Sung

For those not familiar with it, the multilingual Poemas del río Wang is one of the most visually stunning blogs around, not because of any graphic pyrotechnics but through its seemingly endless supply of arresting images from the most diverse places and times. The stories accompanying them are sometimes erudite and always worth reading, and there have been several recent posts of musical interest there too. Here is one on Hafez in contemporary Persian music, with a sound clip. An Italian Bob Dylan singing Dante would be the closest parallel I could think of. Before that there was this recording of a well-known popular song from Odessa, and before that, a clip of Bulat Okudzhava’s Poslednii Trolleibus (“The Last Trolley”). Enjoy them while looking at the images.