Norberto Tavares wrote the song “N’sta farto dês tchon” in 1978, when he was twenty-two years old and living in Portugal. Around 2004 he wrote the lyrics for this song down on paper for me, and we worked together to translate it. We talked through each line, trying to capture the right nuances of meaning in English as we had done for many other of his songs, placing his lyrics on the top line and our negotiated translation in English underneath (figure I.1). The image is included here to illuminate the slow, messy process behind the translation of words, musical styles, meanings, and contexts from one culture to another. The song lyrics express the desire to transcend earthly bonds in order to explore the ocean’s depths and heavens above with the freedom of a fish or a bird—to escape the chains of dirty human existence. The song can be viewed as a metaphor for Tavares’s lifelong quests—to make life better for people in postcolonial Cabo Verde through his musical messages, and to burst through a wall of unanswered existential questions in order to understand his own life’s meaning.