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2013-08-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Tuesday the 13th… the Friday the 13th of the Spanish-speaking world (and vice-versa)

ENLACE AQUI PARA ESPAÑOL/LINK HERE FOR SPANISH

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, August 13, 2013 (that’s today).  How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you might render it as ‘martes, 13 agosto 2013’.

Martes 13, Tuesday the 13th: a combination of day and date that are the object of widely-held popular superstition in the Spanish-speaking world.

(Like November 2012, the month of January 1931 had a ‘martes 13’ – Tuesday the 13th. By the famed artist and cartoonist Florencio Molina Campos, whose humorous but loving depictions of old-time scenes and characters of the  Pampa have adorned wall calendars in Argentina for the better part of a century. Molina Campos was admired by Walt Disney, with whom he struck up a friendship.)

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13’ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskaidekafobia (a terrific Greek word, composed of thirteen+fear, that has the lovely property of sounding exactly like the thing it designates) that Hispanic/Latin American culture shares with Anglo-Saxon and many others across the world, is added a negative apprehension surrounding Tuesday. Tuesday aversion is not common in the English-speaking world (though in the cycle of the work week, it’s certainly not many people’s favorite day). Think of the nursery rhyme foretelling a child’s fortune from the day of its birth (“Tuesday’s child is full of grace…”), or old Solomon Grundy who was “christened on Tuesday”.

In Spanish, though, the name for the second day following the Christian Sabbath is martes, Mars’s Day.  Around this deity, most commonly known as the Roman god of war (equivalent to the Greeks’ Ares), spin a series of negative qualities: aggression, duplicity, hostility, selfishness. Reputedly despised by both his parents, Zeus and Hera, Mars could be worshipped for his valor and power (and apparently Venus did so), but perhaps more often feared. Herein lies at least part of the reason why Tuesday’s stock is so low in Hispanic-Latin American culture. “Día martes,” goes the well-known folk saying reflecting this, “no te cases ni te embarques” [On Tuesday, marry not, nor set sail].

So, thinking of all these associations, let’s go back to our little translation problem. Only now, let’s imagine the year is not 2012 but rather 1980, and what we need to ‘move across’ (the original, physical meaning of ‘translate‘) from English to Spanish is not the date of a letter but the title of a movie. Specifically, director Sean Cunningham’s newly-released horror flick Friday the 13th (still with us almost a third of a century later, having reached twelve installments and a grand total of eleven different directors; is anyone truly in suspense over whether there will be a Part 13?).

With strict ‘dictionary accuracy’, we could release the film under the title Viernes 13.  But to tap into the deeper resonances within Hispanic/Latin American culture, maybe we would better off shifting the day of the week to Tuesday and rendering the title as Martes 13.  And that’s exactly what happened in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries of the Spanish-speaking world. However, the direct or ‘dictionary’ translation was used in still other countries, including Mexico and Spain.

One result of this convoluted set of circumstances: the association of Friday the 13th with bad luck, not native to Hispanic/Latin American culture, has to some extent been ‘imported’ from the English-speaking world—due to the power of what is often called popular, and might more accurately be termed commercial, culture.

And, let us not forget, it’s due also to the influence of an often overlooked group of ‘unacknowledged legislators’: members of the translators’ profession, whose decisions can have a significant impact on human affairs. What’s at stake is clearer when we think of the texts of laws and treaties, or the way that a statesman’s words are translated in a tense international negotiation. But even in this seemingly trivial example of a movie title, there are ‘real world’ implications. People’s likelihood of making certain personal or economic decisions—travel, a purchase, an apartment rental—is influenced by beliefs regarding numbers, dates, days of the week.

More adventures in the world of translation, this science, craft, and art all at the same time! And never more challenging than when cultural phenomena are what we’re translating.

© Copyright 2013 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

A version of this essay appeared at https://interfluency.wordpress.com on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011 and Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012.

Pablo J. Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter, English<>Spanish. With over 20 years of experience and particular specialties in the legal, business, and medical fields. Contact info@interfluency.com or 901-288-3018 if you need world-class translation or interpreting between the English and Spanish languages. Through his company Interfluency Translation+Culture, he aso delivers interactive, informative, and inspiring cultural-awareness training to businesses, churches, schools, and government agencies.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", 13th, America, American, bilingual, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, dates, Davis, days, English-Spanish, español, fear, Friday, Friday the 13th, hispana, Hispano, inglés, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin, Latin American, martes, Martes 13, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, superstition, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, Tuesday, week

2013-01-05 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Educación: education and upbringing

Dear reader,

Last week, we saw how the English expression “Congratulations!” is separated by Spanish into “Felicitaciones!” for a success vs. “¡Felicidades!” on life passages (marriage, birth of a child, New Year).

Similarly, Spanish ser and estar distinguish essence (Es mi hija, She is my daughter) from state  (Está ansiosa por algo, She is anxious about something); English has only “to be”. You “know” 3×3=9 and you “know” someone: Spanish saber and conocer, respectively. A “fish” is pez in the water but pescado on your plate.

In Spanish, educación can mean two things, represented by the photographs above. English “education” only pertains to the left side. Photo on left, photographer unknown, from Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones Mexicanas (www.inehrm.gob.mx); photo on right, origin unknown. Both appear to be from the 1950′s.

 

But it isn’t always the language of Cervantes that makes the finer distinctions; in other cases, it’s Shakespeare’s that does so.

Take Spanish educación.  Like English “education”., it can mean formal study. But it’s also what parents strive to inculcate in their children—in surface matters (saying “thank you” and “please”) and deeper ones (respect, gratitude, kindness).  Manners and values: what English expresses by the word “upbringing” or, more popularly, “raising”.

To be called maleducado (literally: badly educated) is to be thought ill-mannered, disrespectful, selfish, or vulgar.  

This second meaning of educación is probably the more important one in Spanish.  To hear the expression “un hombre educado” (literally, an educated man) is chiefly to think of manners, values, character.

“Education starts in the home” is a widely shared view these days. In some ways, we can say that the Spanish wordeducación already contains this idea.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 13, 2013 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", certified, comparada, comparativa, comparative, comparison, cultura, culture, Davis, educación, education, hispana, Hispanic, Hispano, Julián, latina, Latino, latinoamericana, meaning, Pablo, Pablo Davis, traducción, translation, translator, words

2013-01-01 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Two kinds of congratulations… and how Spanish expresses them

Dear reader,

For some weeks now, the air has been filled with greetings and good wishes: “Happy Holidays”, “Merry Christmas,” “Season’s Greetings” and, for a few days yet, “Happy New Year”.  In Spanish: Felices Fiestas, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Año Nuevo.

There’s one Spanish greeting, though, that English can’t quite reproduce: “¡Felicidades!”

Many English speakers (and even some native Spanish speakers) confuse this interjection with the similar-sounding “¡Felicitaciones!” English routinely expresses both ideas by the single word: “Congratulations!”

The felicitaciones/felicidades pair offers a beautiful example of the subtle shades of meaning that a language (in this case, Spanish) can express.

The distinction is significant: felicitación is an act of praise or congratulation, while felicidad refers to that sublime and blessed state of the human heart, happiness.

Thus a graduation, a promotion, an award, indeed any achievement or victory, merits a congratulatory“¡Felicitaciones!” (An alternative particularly common in Spain: “¡Enhorabuena!”)

On the other hand, transcendent moments of the human condition, the annual cycle, or the great life passages—the birth of a child, a birthday, a wedding, or, indeed, a New Year—inspire the warmer and more elevated“¡Felicidades!”: a wish for much happiness.

It’s fascinating to speculate on the cultural source of this distinction, absent from English. Is Spanish more emotive? Perhaps. We propose, instead, that the answer lies in a stronger sense of ritual and ceremony in the tongue of Cervantes.

¡Buenas palabras… y felicidades!

Pablo

Copyright ©2013 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the January 6, 2013edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", certificado, certified, comparative, congratulations, cultura, culture, diferencia, difference, English, English-Spanish, español, felicidades, felicitaciones, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, interpreter, Julián, Latino, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2012-11-18 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: Why is Lionel Messi shouting?

Dear reader,

Sports headlines around the Spanish-speaking world this week proclaim Barcelona soccer star Lionel Messi’s “78 gritos” (literally, 78 shouts) so far this year.

Lionel Messi celebrates after scoring a goal for the Argentine national soccer team. Of the 78 goals he has converted so far in 2012, 12 came in the albiceleste (white and sky blue) of the Argentine national team, the other 66 and counting with theazulgrana (blue and scarlet) of FC Barcelona .

These gritos, it’s understood, are gritos de gol,shouts of celebration after scoring.  With the pair he netted Nov. 11 against Mallorca, the brilliant Argentine surpassed the record set by “O Rei Pelé” (King Pelé, a phrase almost always used in Portuguese), the immortal Brazilian’s 75 goals in calendar year 1958. He added two more against Zaragoza on Nov. 17.

Lio has nine games left to pursue Gerd Müller’s all-time mark of 85 (set in 1972).

Like “head” (of cattle), this grito is what linguists call a metonymy: a thing (a goal) named by one of its parts (the celebration afterwards).

American English can’t quite convey the emotion and frenzy around the special, infrequent occurrence that is a goal in soccer. “Shout” and “celebration” don’t work in this context. Are we doomed to the blandly literal “goal”?

The language comes alive, on the other hand, to name baseball’s home run: “homer”, “dinger”, “tater” (potato), “round tripper”, and “four bagger”, to name just a few.

Detroit Tigers star Miguel Cabrera connects for one of his 44 home runs of the 2012 campaign. The Venezuelan slugger’s epic season earned him the Triple Crown (led league in home runs, RBI, and batting average), something no player had achieved since 1967.

Now that’s a richness, a lushness of vocabulary, that can stand toe-to-toe with Spanish’s lexicon of the goal, with its tanto (score), golazo (brilliant goal), pepa (pip or seed), pepino (cucumber), pepinillo (pickle), and on and on. And let’s not forget grito!¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

This essay was originally written for the 25 Nov. 2012 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly column “Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation” along with its Spanish-language version.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", baseball, béisbol, Cabrera, certified, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, Davis, deporte, English, English-Spanish, español, fútbol, goal, gol, goles, Hispanic, Hispano, home run, Julián, language, Latin, Latin American, Lionel, Lionel Messi, Messi, Miguel, Miguel Cabrera, Pablo, Pablo Davis, Pablo Julián Davis, soccer, Spanish, sports, terminology, traductor, translation, translator, vocabulary

2012-11-13 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Tuesday the 13th… the Friday the 13th of the Spanish-speaking world (and vice-versa)

ENLACE AQUI PARA ESPAÑOL/LINK HERE FOR SPANISH

Imagine you’re translating a document, from English into Spanish. Say it’s a letter, dated Tuesday, November 13, 2012 (that’s today).  How do you translate that into Spanish? Well, that’s not too difficult: you’d render it as ‘martes, 13 noviembre 2012’.

Martes 13, Tuesday the 13th: a combination of day and date that are the object of widely-held popular superstition in the Spanish-speaking world.

 

(Like November 2012, the month of January 1931 had a ‘martes 13’ – Tuesday the 13th. By the famed artist and cartoonist Florencio Molina Campos, whose humorous but loving depictions of old-time scenes and characters of the  Pampa have adorned wall calendars in Argentina for the better part of a century. Molina Campos was admired by Walt Disney, with whom he struck up a friendship.)

The bad luck commonly held to attach to ‘martes 13’ actually comes in a double dose. To the triskaidekafobia (a terrific Greek word, composed of thirteen+fear, that has the lovely property of sounding exactly like the thing it designates) that Hispanic/Latin American culture shares with Anglo-Saxon and many others across the world, is added a negative apprehension surrounding Tuesday. Tuesday aversion is not common in the English-speaking world (though in the cycle of the work week, it’s certainly not many people’s favorite day). Think of the nursery rhyme foretelling a child’s fortune from the day of its birth (“Tuesday’s child is full of grace…”), or old Solomon Grundy who was “christened on Tuesday”.

In Spanish, though, the name for the second day following the Christian Sabbath is martes, Mars’s Day.  Around this deity, most commonly known as the Roman god of war (equivalent to the Greeks’ Ares), spin a series of negative qualities: aggression, duplicity, hostility, selfishness. Reputedly despised by both his parents, Zeus and Hera, Mars could be worshipped for his valor and power (and apparently Venus did so), but perhaps more often feared. Herein lies at least part of the reason why Tuesday’s stock is so low in Hispanic-Latin American culture. “Día martes,” goes the well-known folk saying reflecting this, “no te cases ni te embarques” [On Tuesday, marry not nor set sail].

So, thinking of all these associations, let’s go back to our little translation problem. Only now, let’s imagine the year is not 2012 but rather 1980, and what we need to ‘move across’ (the original, physical meaning of ‘translate‘) from English to Spanish is not the date of a letter but the title of a movie. Specifically, director Sean Cunningham’s newly-released horror flick Friday the 13th (still with us almost a third of a century later, having reached twelve installments and a grand total of eleven different directors; is anyone truly in suspense over whether there will be a Part 13?).

With strict ‘dictionary accuracy’, we could release the film under the title Viernes 13.  But to tap into the deeper resonances within Hispanic/Latin American culture, maybe we would better off shifting the day of the week to Tuesday and rendering the title as Martes 13.  And that’s exactly what happened in Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries of the Spanish-speaking world. However, the direct or ‘dictionary’ translation was used in still other countries, including Mexico and Spain.

One result of this convoluted set of circumstances: the association of Friday the 13th with bad luck, not native to Hispanic/Latin American culture, has to some extent been ‘imported’ from the English-speaking world—due to the power of what is often called popular, and might more accurately be termed commercial, culture.

And, let us not forget, it’s due also to the influence of an often overlooked group of ‘unacknowledged legislators’: members of the translators’ profession, whose decisions can have a significant impact on human affairs. What’s at stake is clearer when we think of the texts of laws and treaties, or the way that a statesman’s words are translated in a tense international negotiation. But even in this seemingly trivial example of a movie title, there are ‘real world’ implications. People’s likelihood of making certain personal or economic decisions—travel, a purchase, an apartment rental—is influenced by beliefs regarding numbers, dates, days of the week.

More adventures in the world of translation, this science, craft, and art all at the same time! And never more challenging than when cultural phenomena are what we’re translating.

© Copyright 2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

A version of this essay appeared at https://interfluency.wordpress.com on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011.

Pablo J. Davis, PhD, CT is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and a Supreme Court of Tennessee Certified Interpreter, English<>Spanish. With over 20 years of experience, he has particular specialties in the legal, business, and medical fields. Contact info@interfluency.com or 901-288-3018 if you need world-class translation or interpreting between the English and Spanish languages. His company Interfluency Translation+Culture also delivers interactive, informative, and inspiring cultural-awareness training to businesses, churches, schools, and government agencies.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", 13th, America, American, bilingual, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, dates, Davis, days, English-Spanish, español, fear, Friday, Friday the 13th, hispana, Hispano, inglés, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin, Latin American, martes, Martes 13, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, superstition, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, Tuesday, week

2012-10-23 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: The Cha-Cha… and One More Hot Tamale

Dear reader,

This week let’s consider two Spanish words and their English translations: chachachá (that infectious rhythm born in Cuba) and tamal, which we looked at some weeks back.

From that musical colossus, Cuba, there emerged around 1953 another in a long line of dance sensations, a gently upbeat creation by composer, violinist and bandleader Enrique Jorrín.  It derived from the danzón, a rhythm generally played by smaller orchestras of refined or “French” sound, known as ”charangas”, with melodies typically carried by flute and violin.

Jorrín called his rhythm chachachá due to its triple rhythmic figure and the swishing sound of the dancer’s shoes against the floor. (The original onomatopoeia apparently was shashashá.)

In English, it loses the chá and becomes simply “cha-cha”: the name no longer reproduces the rhythm. But why?  We can suspect that phonetics played a role: it’s not easy for English speakers to pull off chachachá’s three crisp syllables (though musicians typically have no such trouble).

Phonetics, too, helped make “tamale” the English singular of Spanish tamal.  Besides the logical (though incorrect) inference that the singular of tamales was tamale, people’s ear told them that “tamale” sounded better in English—it has a pleasing sway and even conveys an exotic note in naming a food that for a century has been delighting North American taste buds.

So: one case of something lost, and another of something gained, in translation.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

A version of this article appeared in La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) published Oct. 21, 2012, along with a Spanish-language version.

Copyright © 2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All rights reserved.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", certificado, certified, cha-cha, chachachá, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, Davis, English, English-Spanish, español, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Latin, Latin American, Latino, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, Spanish-English, traducción, traductor, translation

2012-10-17 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation: You say “tamal”, I say “tamale”

Dear readers,

Tamales have been a favorite food in the US for over a century.  Oddly, Spanish tamal is generally not used in the singular—English speakers tend to say “a tamale”.

This use is so widespread, especially in the phrase “hot tamale” (already a favorite item for sale from roadside stands and urban street vendors before the First World War), that it must be considered the correct English singular.

Another common phrase, “a (real) hot tamale”, describes a physically attractive woman, with a likely added connotation of sparkling, magnetic personality.

Why does English use this “incorrect” singular?

One hypothesis: English speakers inferred from the Spanish plural tamales that the singular must be formed by removing final ‘s’ (the English rule). Linguists call this “back-formation”; it’s how the verb “televise” arose from “television”, or “gruntled” as a humorous opposite of “disgruntled”.

The other possibility: the indigenous (Nahuatl) singular,tamalli, was widely used in old Mexican North/US Southwest Spanish dialect; Anglos might have picked up “tamale” that way.

But retroformation is highly likely.  It’s what’s behind “a frijole” (instead of frijol), for instance.

The process occurs in all languages. In medieval Spanish, Sant’Iago (Saint James) became Santiago; retroformation led people to believe the saint’s name was Tiago (San Tiago).  From there came the “invention” of the name Diego, highly popular today.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

PS For a further reflection on “tamale” vs tamal, please click here.

A version of this essay first appeared in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 23 Sept. 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: back-formation, borrowings, certified, comparative, cultura, cultural, culture, English, English-Spanish, español, Hispanic, Hispano, hot, hot tamale, influence, inglés, Interfluency, interlinguistic, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, language, Latin American, Latino, linguistic, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, retroformación, tamal, tamal or tamale, tamale, tamales, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2012-05-18 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Friday thought: Why “See you Monday” ≠ “Hasta el lunes”

All over the US on a Friday like today, millions of people are wishing co-workers a good weekend and saying “See you Monday.” What if you wanted to say it to a co-worker from Mexico, Colombia, or Puerto Rico—in Spanish?  Translating directly from English, you might say, “Nos vemos el lunes” (literally: We’ll see each other on Monday) or perhaps, a little more freely, “Hasta el lunes” (Until Monday).

But to most Spanish speakers, those phrases will sound a little threadbare.  Something is missing… But what?

Just three little words:  “Si Dios quiere.”  This is how a large proportion of Spanish speakers would utter the common end-of-workweek farewell: “Hasta el lunes, si Dios quiere.”  Si Dios quiere: If God so wishes, or, in more idiomatic English, God willing.

So why is this phrase so important?  Is Latin American and Spanish culture so much more deeply religious than that of the United States? Do most Spanish speakers live in constant fear of accident and illness? Or could it be that the phrase isn’t really that important? Perhaps it’s just a little remnant, a cultural tic whose meaning is lost. Perhaps it’s like saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes, a gesture without real import.

I suggest that it’s more than that… quite a bit more.  The key lies in the discomfort that most native Spanish speakers tend to feel when they hear the phrase uttered without those three little words. It’s hard to put that discomfort into words: perhaps it’s that the phrase sounds too self-assured, too smug… too proud. Overconfident. Perhaps even a little impious, a little blasphemous. Who knows what Monday will bring? Who knows what the future has in store? Keep in mind: this is almost never a conscious thought.  Rather, it’s a deeply held, almost entirely unconscious standpoint towards life.

A close relative of this phenomenon is found in the common conversational exchange of inquiring after one another’s well-being.  “¿Cómo estás?” (How are you?) is most frequently answered not simply with “Bien” (Fine) or “Bien, gracias” (Fine, thanks), or even “Bien, gracias ¿y tú?” (Fine, thanks, and you?)—but, rather, “Bien, gracias a Dios” (literally: Fine, thank God).

These phrases wouldn’t sound natural in most everyday English-language contexts.  In certain settings it might, such as a religious community.  There, something like, “Fine, praise God!” is not unusual.  If we think of older generations—perhaps our grandparents’ generation, or that of their parents—we may also remember hearing phrases like this in English. In rural and small-town settings, folk(sy) expressions like, “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” are still fairly unremarkable.

In ordinary, spoken English, though, responding to “How are you?” with “Fine, thank God!” makes the asker wonder if the other person has just survived an auto accident, a serious illness, or some other ordeal. Try the thought experiment yourself: or better yet, do an actual social experiment and reply, “Fine, thank God!” to the next person who asks how you are doing. Watch that person’s face and you’ll very likely see surprise or puzzlement.

Ultimately, these three little words (“Si Dios quiere” and “Gracias a Dios”) suggest a lot about what it’s like to live in the culture that Spanish language expresses.  The feelings about the world, and the premises underlying those feelings, are different.  To those who have grown up bilingual, and carry in their bones the sensation of moving back and forth across cultural boundaries—what I call Interfluency, the name of my translation and cultural-training company—there are subtly, but unmistakably, different ways of being alive in the world on one or the other side of the boundary.

In English, particularly US English, there is a confident, even bold attitude towards the future and an expectation of success. In Spanish, by contrast, there is at least a gesture of humility, a small linguistic ceremony of respect in the face of life and its uncertainties.  If this attitude can be called religious, it certainly does not belong to any one church or denomination.  “God” may be thought of as the deity or simply as a way of talking about the unknowable.

For those interested in exploring these issues, I recommend Javier Villatoro’s lovely and perceptive essay, “Dios mediante: la percepción cultural del futuro en la lengua española”—of which I only became aware as I was finishing these lines.

More broadly, I would point readers to the wisdom in the Spanish master Miguel de Unamuno, and particularly in his Tragic Sense of Life (El sentimiento trágico de la vida, first published in English translation in 1921). For me, “Si Dios quiere” has something to do with the tragic sense—tragic not in any morbid or pessimistic way, but rather in a recognition of life’s uncertainties and human limitations.

Those uncertainties, those limitations somehow find little place in contemporary US English with its sleek surfaces and aerodynamic speed. But their recognition still breathes in the very pulse of Spanish, and to have grown up in that language is to feel that recognition.

“Si Dios quiere”—like the largely passé English God willing, the Portuguese (Spanish’s fraternal twin) Se Deus quiser, the Arabic Inshallah (whose direct descendant, “ojalá” is still deeply entrenched in contemporary Spanish), the Hebrew and Yiddish Halevai—can be seen, then, as bearing witness to a deeply rooted view of life.

That it’s more than a mere verbal formula, more than an empty gesture, is borne out by the unease most people of Latin American or Iberian birth or origins feel at the bare brashness of an unqualified “See you Monday!”

*   *   *

Thanks for visiting.  Your thoughts on what’s written here, whether of the ‘Amen, brother!’, the ’I agree in part, but I wonder if you’ve considered…’ or even the ‘You’re crazy!’ variety, are very welcome. Please comment, and if you find time spent at this blog worthwhile, please consider subscribing. Nos vemos pronto: See you again soon… si Dios quiere.

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., CT, received his graduate training in Latin American History at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities and a Certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina; his undergraduate studies were at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture, delivering seamless, world-class translation and interpreting to the legal community and other professions, as well as innovative, interactive, and inspiring cultural-awareness training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: American, comparative, confidence, cultura, culture, Dios, English, español, everyday, everyday culture, Friday, future, God, God willing, greetings, hispana, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, intercultural, Interfluency, interpreter, interpreting, language, languages, Latin, Latin American, latina, Latino, optimism, phrases, Si Dios quiere, Spanish, translation, translator, US, weekends

2012-05-04 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Cinco de Mayo not the ‘real’ Mexican national day?

The sense of shared identity that binds an immigrant group together in its adopted home is no mere transplanting of old-country customs.  It involves creativity and innovation—and a dual process of celebrating ancestral ties while affirming group emergence into the fabric of life in the new country.

Calabrians, Sicilians, Tuscans, Abruzzians and other immigrants from the Italian Peninsula began to draw together in the late-19th-century U.S., just when a unified ‘Italy’ was being born.  Columbus Day, Oct. 12 (also, later, ‘Día de la Raza’ or ‘Day of the Hispanic/Latino People’) grew by the 20th century into an Italian-American affirmation.  For the Irish, whose history of mass immigration here is a half-century older, St. Patrick’s (St. Paddy’s) Day plays a similar role, as has Oktoberfest for German-Americans.

So, curious Americans’ periodic discovery that Cinco de Mayo –the Fifth of May—isn’t the ‘real’ Mexican national holiday (that would be Independence Day, Sep. 16), somewhat misses the point of the day: the affirmation of Mexicanness in a new land.

It commemorates not Mexico’s winning of independence from Spain (1821) but a more complex historical moment: Liberals’ 1862 military victory in the Battle of Puebla over French invaders and their Conservative allies.  Starting in the mid-1840s, Mexico was wracked by a sequence of horrors unimaginable to most Americans—half of national territory lost in the U.S.-Mexican War; prolonged civil war triggered by the Liberals’ (most famously Benito Juárez’s) anti-clerical, anti-aristocratic reforms; a British-French-Spanish triple invasion, ostensibly to collect debts from a land bled dry by war; and finally a full-blown French occupation in alliance with the civil war’s defeated Conservatives.

The Mexican triumph at Puebla, against a superior French force double in size, forms an imperfect and contradictory part of the larger historical story.  Ironies abound in its celebration.  For one thing, after Puebla the French actually prevailed, ruling Mexico for three years.  Also, a key figure at Puebla, young Gen. Porfirio Díaz, later became a dictatorial president whose endless, corrupt reelections eventually triggered the Mexican Revolution.

There are more ironies: the French had long dreamed of achieving footholds in former Spanish America.  In the 1830s, geographer Michel Chevalier coined the term ‘Latin America’—a completely novel invention designed to make France’s ambitions in the Americas sound natural and logical. It caught on among many newly-independent Mexicans, Argentines, Chileans, etc.,  eagerly seeking identities separate from Spain.  Moreover, the ruler Napoleon III sent to take the Mexican throne, Maximilian, was a naïve and ill-starred monarch who proved too liberal for the Conservatives, and awkwardly solicitous of Indian and mestizo peasants’ rights.  Eventually executed, he and his wife (haunted by madness during her widowhood) became tragic, romantic figures with a contradictory place in Mexican memory.

So Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday, not the commemoration of independence from Spain, nor of definitive victory against the French.  But Puebla preserves the memory of an unexpected victory after a generation of endless invasion, war, and loss.  As such, it has become a forum for expression of the new and continually evolving ways of being, and proudly feeling, Mexican in the United States—as well as an opportunity, partly superficial and commercial to be sure, for Americans to interact with Mexican culture.  Literally hundreds of local celebrations across the U.S. mark the day.

In an era when Mexico’s sons and daughters here face twin scourges of economic crisis and political vulnerability unlike any in living memory , it’s possible that Cinco de Mayo has never been quite as important as it is today.

Pablo Julián Davis

Pablo J. Davis, Ph.D., CT, received his graduate training in Latin American History at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities and a Certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He is Principal and Owner of Interfluency Translation+Culture, delivering seamless, world-class translation and interpreting to the legal community and other professions, as well as cultural awareness training.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Cinco, Cinco de Mayo, Columbus Day, comparative, comparison, cultura, culture, Davis, German, German-American, Hispanic, Hispano, history, holidays, identity, immigrants, immigration, Interfluency, Irish, Irish-American, Italian, Italian-American, Italy, Julián, Latin, Latino, Mayo, Memphis, Mexican, Mexican-American, Mexico, Oktoberfest, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, St. Paddy's, St. Patrick's Day, States, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, United, United States, USA

2011-12-23 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, and other greetings of the season

When a 25-year-old guitarist named José Montserrate Feliciano García, from the historic Puerto Rican town of Lares (birthplace of the country’s 19th century movement for independence from Spain) recorded an album of Christmas music released by RCA Victor Latino in 1970, he did a number of things.

First, thanks mainly to the extremely simple but catchy title track, “Feliz Navidad,” he vaulted to worldwide fame as a recording artist.

Second, in the public perception of his artistry, he became trapped by that success: most music fans are unaware of Feliciano’s breathtaking mastery as a virtuoso of the guitar (much as pop singing success obscured the vast musical talents of artists like Nat Cole and George Benson).

And third and most importantly in this season, young José Feliciano made the Christmas greeting ‘Feliz Navidad’ one of the small handful of Spanish phrases that virtually every English speaker—not to mention speakers of other languages around the world—knows.

But Feliz Navidad is not the only greeting widely exchanged in the Spanish-speaking world at this time of year.  The more ecumenical Felices Fiestas (Happy Holidays) is also commonplace.  This may come as a surprise to some who see—and lament—in ‘Happy Holidays’ a bland securalization that they imagine to be a recent departure from a more comfortably dominant Christian culture in the United States, and who might assume that Hispanic/Latin American culture has not experienced a similar trend.

In truth, Felices Fiestas and Feliz Navidad were more or less equivalent in popularity for roughly the first half of the 20th century, with the more overtly religious greeting actually becoming much more widely used since roughly 1970 or 1975.  At least, this is the picture that emerges from the literature that Google has scanned and gathered into the remarkable corpus accessible through the Ngram Viewer. In this diagram, Feliz Navidad is in blue and green, andFelices Fiestas in red and yellow.

The phrase Felices Fiestas (Happy Holidays) is not even necessarily secular.  After all, the root of Engl. ‘holidays’ is ‘holy days’, and Span. fiestas can refer to religious observances too. For example, a 19th century religious polemic by the Spanish cleric Valentín Mañosa y Arboix, Nuevo triunfo de la verdad católica [The New Triumph of Catholic Truth], proposes the following greeting to be used with fellow Christians one believes to be theologically in error:

“Deseo a V. y compañeros felices fiestas, y que el divino Jesús con su luz eterna disipe las tinieblas del error en que, por desgracia, están Vds. envueltos.” [I wish you and your colleagues happy holidays, and that the divine Jesus with his eternal light may dispel the darkness of error by which, unfortunately, all of you are surrounded.]

Though it must have been satisfying to compose, Father Valentín’s formula has, somehow, not quite caught on as a popular holiday greeting.

In addition to Navidad and las Navidades, Spanish has another way of referring to Christmas, namely las Pascuas de Navidad. The word pascua is most familiar, and most commonly used, for Easter.  It derives, through Latinpascha and Greek πάσχα, ultimately from the Hebrew pesach (Passover).

But pascua has an additional meaning, registered this way by the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española [Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy]: “Cada una de las solemnidades del nacimiento de Cristo, del reconocimiento y adoración de los Reyes Magos y de la venida del Espíritu Santo sobre el Colegio Apostólico” (Each of the ecclesiastical festivities of the birth of Christ, His recognition and adoration by the Magi, and the coming of the Holy Spirit over the Apostles.”)  In a word: Christmastide.

So, Felices Pascuas de Navidad, or Felices Pascuas for short,  is another greeting of the season, particularly widespread in Spain.

Of course, expressing ’Merry Christmas,’ ‘Happy Holidays,’ or ‘Season’s Greetings’ in Spanish as Feliz Navidad, Felices Fiestas, or Felices Pascuas de Navidad is only part of the broad act of cultural translation that this season brings. The imagery of snow, while more and more a wistful memory in parts of the U.S., is downright fantastic in most of Latin America.  There, the reality of Christmastime is summer, swimming trunks, and fireworks—in Lima or Buenos Aires, the Christmas Eve night sky is like a Stateside Fourth of July.

There are other cultural subtleties, as well.  Papá Noel and Santa Claus (sometimes spelled Santa Clos) rival one another for the name of the Polar deliverer of gifts.  Gifts are generally opened at, or just after, midnight, as opposed to Christmas morning most typical in the U.S. More significantly, the traditional procession of  Las Posadas, whose observance is now limited mainly to Mexico and parts of Central America, reenacts Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging.

And in large parts of the Spanish-speaking world, El Día de Reyes (literally ‘Day of the Kings,’ or Epiphany) on Jan. 6, persists as a more traditional Christmastide celebration. Children place shoes (or, in some countries, boxes) outside their doorway as a receptacle for the Wise Men’s presents. Straw and water are left out to feed the camels—we can sense an echo of this custom in the setting out of milk and cookies for Santa and his reindeer.

Observance of Christmas began to increase substantially in Latin America in the 1960s, overwhelming the more traditional Reyes and bringing with it all the Germanic/Nordic  iconography of snowfall, evergreens, Santa Claus, and the rest. But Jan. 6 has held on both as a tradition, and in part as a resistance to cultural Americanization.

The really smart kids, of course, celebrate both—the fact that they will collect presents on two occasions less than two weeks apart, of course, being very far from their minds! Felices Fiestas to all, y a todos Happy Holidays from Pablo Julián Davis and Interfluency Translation+Culture.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: Christmas, comparative, cultura, cultural translation, culture, English, Felices Fiestas, Feliz Navidad, greetings, Happy Holidays, Hispanic, holidays, Latin American, Latino, Merry, Merry Chistmas, Season's Greetings, secular, Spanish, traducción

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