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This is one of my favorites from when my kids' choir sang it. The repeated references to hope and freedom are great, they're phrased slightly differently but work in both languages. The translation is pretty good--you get weird phrasing like "new protocols [will need to be] declared" in English when I don't think the Spanish had anything as weird as "protocols" sounds to us. We also have the issues where "brothers" is more inclusive in Spanish than in English, so that has to be reworded, and you can tell it's from Spain because they use the -d vosotros commands!

The melody for the first three verses ends on the second note of the scale, which creates momentum and carries you forward into the next verse--it's not "resolved," so you want to push forward. But the last verse comes to a satisfying conclusion on the tonic with the "resolution" of "free"/"libertad," so the musical notation is "okay verses one through three go here and repeat, the last time through, jump to this slightly different measure."
How's the Spanish translation?

Um...not sure. The subtlety is that in verses 2 and 3, the English version gives directions to "yourselves"--you all should be open to God's peace, you all should share God's peace. Part of the reason for that is that English is in general more compact than Spanish in terms of syllable count (at least comparing apples to oranges this way, I'm not sure about all translations), so throwing in an extra word like "yourselves" helps pad out the English lines to match the Spanish ones. The original appears to only be addressed to you-singular.

How does it only "appear," don't you know?

No I don't.

So you're not very good at Spanish then.


Well, probably. But the issue is that the most common form of "you all" that I learned in Spanish class is really only applicable to Spain-Spanish (Castillian), a lot of Latin America doesn't have a strict form for that. But then nobody likes the Spain version because it has extra accent marks even in the present tense, and we all hate accent marks. But then talking with colloquial speakers who know more than me it sounds like some regions Latin America actually do have their own dialects for "you guys" but nobody puts it in textbooks so who knows...Have I had this conversation already? I may need a tag just for this topic...Okay, I've gone back to add the tag to a previous post.
Is this telling just one person to sing?

No, all the people!

How do you know?

Because it uses the -d ending for vosotros we only learn about sporadically in high school (and never the Latin American equivalents), which also means it's the Spain version of Spanish.

Is this originally from Spain?

Brazil, actually. Guessing our editors didn't feel the need to appease to a Portuguese-language audience.

How's the translation?

Pretty good, which is made easier by the fact that each verse is basically one line repeated three times, and then the last line is the same in all the verses. Not a high Shannon density here.

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