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greetings

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

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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