An Immigrant's 'Star-Spangled Banner,' En Espanol

Go to this site and click on the audio link to listen to this Spanish version.    - - Donna Poisl

by NPR STAFF

In 2006, Roger Arias went into his garage searching for a long-lost treasure. He remembered a story about his grandmother and a Spanish translation of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

"I dug through my boxes and sure enough, there was a folder," he says. "It said 'The National Anthem,' and she had version 1 through 10. She kept every one of them."

Clotilde Arias wrote the translation at the end of World War II, as President Franklin Roosevelt was trying to win allies through cultural exchange. Roosevelt sent artists like Walt Disney and Orson Welles to Latin America, and commissioned translations of patriotic songs to send abroad. Marvette Perez, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., says the move was an effort to spread patriotism to other countries.
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