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2015-02-21 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Ladybug, ladybug, don’t fly away!

Enlace para español/Link for Spanish

Dear reader:

We’re used to thinking of cultural difference.  But some things in this world are so inherently beautiful that people everywhere, and always, seem to have loved them. To name a few: butterflies, roses, kites, rainbows.

Este diminuto insecto, ¿puede que sea amado por todas las culturas humanas?

Is it possible that this little insect is loved by all human cultures?

A small, flying insect, usually red and spotted—English “ladybug,” Spanish mariquita (little Mary), vaquita de San Antonio (St. Anthony’s little cow), and other names—also has a strong claim on membership in this select group.

The English and Spanish names are subtly linked: the “lady” in “ladybug” seems to refer to the Virgin Mary.

Some others: French la bête à bon Dieu (the good Lord’s bug), Russian bozha kapovka (God’s little cow), Dutch lieveheerbeestje (the dear Lord’s little animal), Yiddish moyshe rabbeynus ferdele (or) kiyele (Moses’s little horse, or little cow).

Why this affection so strong it often crosses into the sacred? The ladybug’s pretty colors are not unlike a butterfly’s; the spots remind us of cows.  Ladybugs readily rest or walk on a human hand.  And mariquita, a farmer’s friend, eats such agricultural pests as the aphid.

Some religious traditions, like Judaism, shrink from naming the Deity, so the prophet Moses is used instead. Spanish also steers clear of God in naming this insect, displacing to the Virgin or St. Anthony.

Maybe the ladybug is one of those utterly joyous things whose contemplation once moved Robert Louis Stevenson to write: The world is so full of a number of things/I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

             ¡Buenas palabras/Good words!

Pablo

Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is a Certified Translator (ATA/American Translators Association) eng>spa and a Certified Interpreter (Tennessee State Courts) eng<>spa, as well as a recognized trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and cultural competence. He has over 25 years experience in these fields. An earlier version of this column was written for the Jan. 24-30, 2015 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as part of his bilingual weekly column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.  

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", cultura, culture, Davis, English, español, inglés, Interfluency, ladybug, mariquita, Memphis, Pablo, San Antonio, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, vaquita, vaquita de San Antonio

2015-02-17 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

So who is this Joe Blow, anyway?

Enlace para español/Link here for Spanish

Dear reader,

What do you call someone whose identity you don’t know? What about someone who doesn’t exist? How do you refer to someone whose name you can’t quite remember? These and other, similar, sorts of linguistic situations, each subtly different from the others, are surprisingly common—and they’ve given rise to an amazing panoply of pseudo or quasi-names.

El nombre ficticio de "John Q. Public" es muy usado en EEUU en el ámbito publicitario y en el gubernamental.

The fictitious John Q. Public and his somewhat lesser-known sister (or perhaps spouse) Jane are commonly used in advertising and government communication.

You can say a selective employer “won’t hire just any Tom, Dick or Harry”—or  “any Joe Blow” or “Joe Schmoe.” A Hispanic name that expresses ordinariness to the point of anonymity is Juan Pérez—akin to “John Smith.”  In a somewhat more formal vein, advertising and government language often makes use of a fictitious “John Q. Public” and, somewhat less commonly, “Jane Q. Public.”

The heritage of Arabic, which medieval Spanish speakers lived cheek-to-jowl with for eight centuries (to A.D. 1492), gave the language such anonymous or “placeholder” names as  Fulano (or Fulano de Tal), Zutano, and Mengano. Their sisters might be Fulana, Zutana, and Mengana. There are many others.

What if someone’s name is on the tip of your tongue? English has “What’s-his-name” or, even less elegantly, “What’s-his-face” or the potentially insulting “So-and-so.”

Coso in some Spanish-speaking countries can refer to someone in this situation (or when the thing you can’t quite remember is the name of an object—as in English “thing-a-ma-jig”).  Fulanito and Fulanita can serve the same function for a person.

When you want to wash your hands of something, as in “Let George do it”, Argentine and Uruguayan Spanish offers a series of funny names: Que lo haga Magoya (Let Magoya do it). This imaginary sucker is also called Montoto, Mongo, or Mongo Aurelio.

These characters can reappear when you don’t believe a word someone’s saying:  Andá a contarle a Magoya (Go tell it to Magoya). Or—and here the name’s not anonymous, but the phrase expresses the height of futility—Andá cantarle a Gardel (Go sing to Gardel), the greatest tango singer of all time. An English equivalent, popular from around the Spanish-American War to World War I, but still used:  “Tell it to the Marines.”

Yet another situation where we come up with a quasi-name is when we prefer not to overtly identify someone, but speaker and listener are both well aware of who’s being discussed—indeed, this person may himself or herself be present: “You-know-who got up on the wrong side of bed today,” which in Spanish might go this way: Uno (or female Una)  que yo sé se levantó con el pie izquierdo.

Finally, the reverse also happens: we use the name of a real person to designate a category of persons.  Phrases like “The Lebron Jameses and the Kobe Bryants of the world” are much used in English, though not absent from Spanish: Los Lebron James y los Kobe Bryant del mundo.

Good words! / ¡Buenas palabras!

Copyright ©2015 by Pablo J. Davis. All rights reserved.

Pablo Julián Davis, PhD, CT is a Certified Translator (ATA/American Translators Association) eng>spa and a Certified Interpreter (Tennessee State Courts) eng<>spa, as well as a recognized trainer in the fields of translation, interpreting, and cultural competence. He has over 25 years experience in these fields. An earlier version of this column was written for the Feb. 22-28, 2015 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee) as part of his bilingual weekly column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.  

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Davis, Fulano, Interfluency, Joe Blow, Joe Schmoe, John Q. Public, Magoya, Mengano, Mongo, Montoto, names, nombres, Pablo, Pablo Davis, pseudónimos, pseudonyms, traducción, translation, Zutano

2015-02-14 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

“My better half”… the interesting way Spanish expresses this concept

Enlace para español/Link here for Spanish

Dear reader,

Spanish speakers often say “mi media naranja” (literally: “my half-orange”) to mean “my husband,” “my wife,” etc.

The phrase has an informal, humorously affectionate tone, not unlike “my better half,” which is widely used by English speakers.

La cúpula del Monasterio del Escorial, Madrid. La palabra "cimborio" puede significar el cuerpo cilíndrico que sirve de base para la cúpula, o la cúpula misma, que también puede llamarse "bóveda" o... ¡"media naranja"!

The dome of the Monastery of El Escorial, near Madrid.  The Spanish word “cimborio” can refer to the cylindrical body that forms the base of the dome, or the dome itself, which can also be referred to as “cúpula,” “bóveda” (vault)… or even “media naranja” (literally: half-orange), which happens to be the popular Spanish equivalent of “my better half”!

A common explanation: since no two oranges are identical, each half-orange only has one possible match. In this view, media naranja isn’t just one’s mate, but the perfect match, something like “soul mate.”

Another, similar theory, widespread on the Web, traces the term to Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes speaks of (the already then) ancient notion that originally humans were double (man-woman, woman-woman, and man-man). Then, one day, Zeus decided to split them in two; since then, we’ve all been presumably searching for the literally missing half we long to be reunited with.

Aristophanes’s theory, despite the prestige of its ancient-Greek origin, tells us nothing about why the Spanish phrase happens to use a citrus fruit, in particular, to express this idea.

The real explanation may lie in architecture, of all places. The dome—as of a church—is known as a cúpula, or cimborio (which can also mean the cylindrical base on which the dome rests) or even as… our old friend, a media naranja, or half-orange! Cimborio itself derives from a Greek word for a certain type of fruit.

It could very well be that the vault of a domed church, which is a symbol and representation of Heaven, gives us a way of referring to the beloved—very much like the popular term of affection in Spanish, “mi cielo”—“my heaven.”

¡Buenas palabras… Good words!

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", better half, couple, Davis, enamorados, español, inglés, Interfluency, media naranja, Pablo, pareja, soul mate, soulmate, traducción, translation

2013-11-01 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Is Día de Muertos/Day of the Dead a ‘Mexican Halloween’?

by Pablo J. Davis

We’re in the brief interval between Halloween, widely celebrated in the US, and the festival known as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or ‘Día de Muertos’ and associated primarily with Mexico, though it’s observed in different ways throughout most of Latin America. It’s a good time to think about cultural similarities and differences.

La Calavera de la Catrina, the brilliant creation of Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, has been the icon of El Día de Muertos for a century now.

Many in the US think of the ‘Día de Muertos’ (Day of the Dead) as the ‘Mexican Halloween’. But is it really so? Does the one ‘translate’ to the other? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos may share certain symbols, and the time of year, but are markedly different phenomena.

The (often unsuspected) differences between what many people think of as equivalent holidays is not quite what is meant by the term  ’false friends’.  The latter term refers to words that appear to the foreign speaker to mean one thing, due to their similarity with a familiar word in her language, but that in fact mean something different.  An English speaker, on reading in Spanish that ‘Gómez sufrió repetidas injurias a manos de Pérez’, may imagine that Pérez repeatedly assaulted Gómez, causing him physical injuries; when in fact, Spanish ‘injuria’ means insults, lies, slander, and other sorts of verbal attacks.  False friends can be tricky, but ultimately are fairly easily caught and corrected by speakers with good mastery of both languages.

Not so cultural phenomena.  There the differences are more subtle, may not even be captured by the bilingual dictionary.  Most English speakers, for instance, more readily use ‘friend’ where a Spanish speaker tends to use ‘compañero’ or ‘colega’, reserving ‘amigo’ or ‘amiga’ for a closer relationship. In other words, ‘amigo/amiga’ is a harder title to earn – we can think of it as perhaps socially more ’expensive’ – than is ‘friend’. No criticism of either culture meant here: it’s simply a cultural difference, an important one that can cause hurt and misunderstanding when not perceived by one side or the other.

What does all this mean for Halloween and the Día de los Muertos?  These two holidays, seemingly close equivalents if not downright interchangeable, map very differently onto the two cultures.  Halloween is largely about defying and even mocking death, about neutralizing its terrors by rendering them theatrical.  There is a kind of daring play involved, a dancing around the macabre.

In Mexican (and, more broadly, Latin American) culture, el Día de los Muertos is something else entirely.  One celebrates, remembers, honors, one’s deceased loved ones – parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles – it’s common to hear people speak of ‘mi muertito’ or ‘mi muertita’ (my beloved dead one) for a deceased father or grandmother, spouse or sibling. Ancient, pre-Columbian and pre-Christian traditions of ancestor worship and love were intertwined, over the colonial decades and centuries that unfolded after Contact and Conquest, with the Christian calendar and rites to create something new: scholars of religious history and culture refer to ‘syncretic’ religious practices.  Thus the celebration of the Día de los Muertos came to coincide with All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, on the Christian calendar.

The ramifications of ritual involved in this festivity are elaborate and complex.  The baking of cakes in the form of skulls and skeletons, the making of skeletal figurines often fully dressed and adorned with hats and other accessories, the fashioning of altars bearing photographs of beloved dead and containing offerings to them, the creation of satiric verses, and a rich graphic tradition of death-related iconography (most famously in the work of José Guadalupe Posada, whose ‘La Catrina’ is above left) are just some of the flowerings of festive practice that the Día de los Muertos has given rise to.

Though there are some cultural-religious practices elsewhere in Latin America that have some commonalities with El Día de los Muertos – for instance, the cult of ‘San La Muerte’ (Saint Death) in the Guaraní cultural zone of northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay, deeply rooted in the populace but rejected by the Catholic Church as pagan practice – there is nothing quite like the centrality of El Día de los Muertos in Mexican culture.

Still, wholeness and acceptance in the face of mortality, and the imperative of sustaining connection with loved ones no longer living – the heart of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos – form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui (1908-1992) expressed this idea as beautifully as anyone ever has. Half a century ago, in his memorable anthem, ‘Los hermanos’, the singer, guitarist, composer, and folklorist wrote:

Yo tengo tantos hermanos     I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar.        that I can’t count them all.
En el valle, la montaña,          In the valleys, in the mountains,
en la pampa y en el mar.        On the pampas and at sea.

Cada cual con sus trabajos,    Each one with his work,
con sus sueños, cada cual.      with her dreams, each one.
Con la esperanza adelante,     With hope before them
con los recuerdos detrás.         And memories behind

. . .

Y así, seguimos andando                 And so we go on,
curtidos de soledad.                         Hardened by loneliness
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos    And inside us, we carry our dead
pa que nadie quede atrás.              So that no one is left behind

Yo tengo tantos hermanos              I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar . . .            that I cannot count them all . . .

In the end, interpreting cultural phenomena across languages challenges us to a subtlety of understanding even beyond what translation usually demands.  Things that look the same can be fundamentally different.

Copyright ©2011-2013 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
This essay originally appeared at http://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011. It is being republished this year with  an accompanying Spanish translation.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", bilingual, certificado, certified, cross-cultural, cultura, culture, Davis, Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, English, español, Halloween, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpretación, intérprete, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2013-02-03 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Spanish on the Map/El español en el mapa

San Fernando de las Barrancas, Spanish fort at what would become the site of Memphis, Tennessee; c. 1795 …… San Fernando de las Barrancas, fuerte español en la que devendría la ubicación de Memphis, Tennessee; c. 1795.

Aquí Memphis: Spanish on the Memphis and Mid-South Map

Free Public Lecture by Dr. Pablo J. Davis

February 7, 2013  (6:00 – 7:45 p.m.) at Pink Palace Museum, 3050 Central Ave., Memphis TN 38111

Florida, Texas, and California, not Memphis and the Mid-South, are what come most readily to mind when we think of Spanish place names in the US. Yet Gayoso Ave. downtown; nearby Cordova TN; De Soto County MS; and San Fernando de las Barrancas (the Spanish fort built in 1795 near about where the Pyramid stands today) are just some of the historical and cultural traces of the Spanish language and Hispanic/Latin American culture in Memphis and the surrounding region. Dr. Pablo J. Davis’s lecture will explore these links and place them in the broader context of Mid-South toponyms.

Dr. Davis, a graduate of Johns Hopkins and Columbia Universities in Latin American History, with a certificate from the University of Buenos Aires, is a certified professional translator/interpreter as well as cultural educator and trainer (www.interfluency.com); his bilingual column “Mysteries and Enigmas of Translation” appears weekly in La Prensa Latina and at the interfluency.wordpress.com blog.

Date: February 7, 2013 Reception: 6:00 – 6:30pm Lecture: 6:30 – 7:30pm Q & A: 7:30 – 8:00pm

Admission is free and reservations are not required. Lecture is in English, however, during Q&A questions or comments may be made in Spanish and will be interpreted.
For more information, please call 901-636-2389 (for information in Spanish, please email pablo@interfluency.com or call 901-288-3018)

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", conferencia, cultura, culture, Davis, español, geográficos, historia, history, Interflows, Interfluency, Julián, lecture, Medio Sur, Memphis, Mid-South, names, nombres, Pablo, Pablo Davis, Palace, Pink, Pink Palace, Pink Palace Museum, place, place names, Spanish, Spanish place names, Tennessee, topónimos, traductor, translator

2012-11-26 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Machos, males and he-men

Dear reader,

The recent, tragic death of seven-time champion boxer Héctor “Macho” Camacho has filled headlines around the world, and put on many tongues a word that was the nickname of the great prizefighter from Bayamón, Puerto Rico—and is a popular nickname throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

The meaning of macho in Spanish, biologically, is simply “male”. The Spanish and English words both derive from the Latin masculus.

Héctor Luis Camacho Matías, El “Macho” Camacho, native of Bayamón, Puerto Rico and holder, at different times, of seven different championship belts.

 

Macho is also widely used in the Spanish-speaking world as an appellative, as in “¿Cómo estás, macho?”(“How are you, man?”).The term is also the main way to designate almost any male animal.  For instance:víbora macho (male snake), ardilla macho (male squirrel), gato macho (male cat).  English is rich in equivalents. Besides the formal, biologically literal “male”, as in “male rabbit”, there is a wealth of folk terms like “jack rabbit”,  “tomcat”, “billy goat”. Other common terms for male: “buck” (deer, antelope, ferret, squirrel, etc.), “bull” (moose, hippopotamus, elephant, shark, seal), and “cock” (hawk, turkey, pheasant, indeed almost any bird).

Curiously, the English word “macho”, taken directly from Spanish, means not simply male but rather hypermasculine, very virile or aggressive. “Macho man”, technically (but not actually) redundant, is also widely used; readers over 40 or 50 years old will recall the humorous title of The Village People’s 1978 song.  These uses, documented in English for at least a century and a half, have grown dramatically since the 1960s. Not to mention “machismo” to mean hypermasculinity or male chauvinism, appearing around 1970 (in Spanish it dates roughly to 1900).

Given the word’s connotations in their language, many English speakers aren’t aware that Spanish macho refers simply to the male gender, as when a baby boy is born and people say “Salió macho“. That is, the word that in one language just means “male” is taken by members of another linguistic community to express an extreme version of masculinity.

Interesting (though not necessarily a reason for Hispanic pride) that the English language owes this word to Spanish!

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved. This essay was originally written for the December 9, 2012 edition of La Prensa Latina (Memphis, Tennessee), as part of the weekly bilingual column Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traducción.

Pablo Julián Davis is an ATA (American Translators Association) Certified Translator, English>Spanish, and Certified by the Supreme Court as an Interpreter, English<>Spanish. He delivers world-class translation and interpreting, as well as inspiring and interactive cultural training, through his company Interfluency Translation+Culture. He can be reached at pablo@interfluency.com.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: American, animal, Camacho, cultura, culture, Davis, English, Hispanic, Interfluency, languages, Latin, Latino, machisimo, macho, Macho Camacho, macho man, male, man, masculine, masculino, names, Pablo, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, US

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

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: To translate or not to translate – DREAMers

Dear readers,

The 2012 presidential election underscored the active influence of people of Latin American origin on the political, not to mention the social, cultural, and economic life, of the United States.

Against this backdrop, a social movement has been born: young Hispanics/Latinos, brought to the US as children via informal immigration (to persist in calling it “illegal” flies in the face of logic, not to mention basic decency), now dream of college study, work, and access to all the possibilities of a full life.

Signs at a march in favor of the DREAM Act. Note the verbatim allusion in the middle sign to the famous phrase pronounced by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 Poor People’s March on Washington.

 

Why do they call themselves “Dreamers” and not the Spanish Soñadores?

All languages import foreign words. English “passport” comes from French, “hoosegow” from Spanishjuzgado. Thinking of the recent hurricane, “levee” is French in origin, “dike” Dutch.

Spanish took English input, French menú, Arabic alcohol, Náhuatl tomate (the last three entered English, too).

They’re “loan words” but, oddly, are never returned!

Some linguists classify loans either as legitimate, supplying a void in the borrowing language (English had no way to say “alcohol” other than to use the Arabic word, and Spanish likewise), or as “barbarisms” made unnecessary by the prior existence of an equivalent word or words (why use chauffeur when we already had “driver”?). But the foreign word, far from being unnecessary, tends to offer, usefully, a different tone or connotation.

This helps us understand “Dreamers”. First, the movement seeks passage of the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act; that name, with its patriotic undertones, makes sense on petitions and protest signs.

And what could be more natural for a generation growing up in the US and steeped in its culture, than to tap the inspiration and emotional power of the term “American Dream”— not to mention the echoes of Dr. King’s immortal phrase.  The logic underlying this use of “Dreamers” is compelling. Sometimes, we translate best by not translating.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

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

A version of this essay, together with its English-language version, was originally written for La Prensa Latina(Memphis, Tennessee), appearing in the 9 Sept. 2012 edition. It was part of the weekly column entitled Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation/Misterios y Enigmas de la Traduccion.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", Act, borrowings, certificado, certified, cultura, culture, Davis, DREAM, DREAM Act, Dreamers, English, español, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, Julián, King, Latin, Latin American, Latino, loan, loanwords, Luther, Martin, Martin Luther King, Pablo, Pablo Davis, política, politics, slogans, Spanish, traducción, traducir, traductor, translate, translation, translator, USA, vocabulary, words

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

Is Día de los Muertos the Mexican Halloween?

Grinning skulls, jangling skeletons… candies, cakes, and other sweets… Halloween is almost upon us, and so too is the festival known in Mexico as ‘Día de los Muertos’ or more simply ‘Día de Muertos’.  They are just two days apart: in 2012, Halloween falls on a Wednesday (Oct.31) and el Día de los Muertos –  often rendered in  English as ‘the (Mexican) Day of the Dead’ – on Friday (Nov.2).  Surely they are two near-identical cultural equivalents! Surely they ‘translate‘ clearly and correctly one to the other!

But do they really? Just as the Spanish word ‘amigo’ (or ‘amiga’) and English ‘friend’ may be side-by-side in bilingual dictionaries, yet tend to mean quite different things to the people using them – and the same can be said for familia/family, fiesta/party, and countless other culturally significant word pairs – so Halloween and Día de los Muertos share some key symbols and the time of year but are radically different phenomena.

The (often unsuspected) differences between what many people think of as equivalent holidays is not quite what is meant by the term  ’false friends’.  The latter term refers to words that appear to the foreign speaker to mean one thing, due to their similarity with a familiar word in her language, but that in fact mean something different.  An English speaker, on reading in Spanish that ‘Gómez sufrió repetidas injurias a manos de Pérez’, may imagine that Pérez repeatedly assaulted Gómez, causing him physical injuries; when in fact, Spanish ‘injuria’ means insults, lies, slander, and other sorts of verbal attacks.  False friends can be tricky, but ultimately are fairly easily caught and corrected by speakers with good mastery of both languages.

Not so cultural phenomena.  There the differences are more subtle, may not even be captured by the bilingual dictionary.  Most English speakers, for instance, more readily use ‘friend’ where a Spanish speaker tends to use ‘compañero’ or ‘colega’, reserving ‘amigo’ or ‘amiga’ for a closer relationship. In other words, ‘amigo/amiga’ is a harder title to earn – we can think of it as perhaps socially more ’expensive’ – than is ‘friend’. No criticism of either culture meant here: it’s simply a cultural difference, an important one that can cause hurt and misunderstanding when not perceived by one side or the other.

What does all this mean for Halloween and the Día de los Muertos?  These two holidays, seemingly close equivalents if not downright interchangeable, map very differently onto the two cultures.  Halloween is largely about defying and even mocking death, about neutralizing its terrors by rendering them theatrical.  There is a kind of daring play involved, a dancing around the macabre.

In Mexican culture, el Día de los Muertos is something else entirely.  One celebrates, remembers, honors, one’s deceased loved ones – parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles – it’s common to hear people speak of ‘mi muertito’ or ‘mi muertita’ (my beloved dead one) for a deceased father or grandmother, spouse or sibling. Ancient, pre-Columbian and pre-Christian traditions of ancestor worship and love were intertwined, over the colonial decades and centuries that unfolded after Contact and Conquest, with the Christian calendar and rites to create something new: scholars of religious history and culture refer to ‘syncretic’ religious practices.  Thus the celebration of the Día de los Muertos came to coincide with All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, on the Christian calendar.

The ramifications of ritual involved in this festivity are elaborate and complex.  The baking of cakes in the form of skulls and skeletons, the making of skeletal figurines often fully dressed and adorned with hats and other accessories, the fashioning of altars bearing photographs of beloved dead and containing offerings to them, the creation of satiric verses, and a rich graphic tradition of death-related iconography (most famously in the work of José Guadalupe Posada, whose ‘La Catrina’ is above left) are just some of the flowerings of festive practice that the Día de los Muertos has given rise to.

Though there are some cultural-religious practices elsewhere in Latin America that have some commonalities with El Día de los Muertos – for instance, the cult of ‘San La Muerte’ (Saint Death) in the Guaraní cultural zone of northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay, deeply rooted in the populace but rejected by the Catholic Church as pagan practice – there is nothing quite like El Día de los Muertos and its centrality in Mexican culture.

Still, the wholeness and acceptance in the face of mortality, and the imperative of sustaining connection with loved ones no longer living, that are the heart of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui, wrote half a century ago in his memorable anthem, ‘Los hermanos’:

Yo tengo tantos hermanos     I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar.        that I can’t count them all.
En el valle, la montaña,          In the valleys, in the mountains,
en la pampa y en el mar.        On the pampas and at sea.

Cada cual con sus trabajos,    Each one with his work,
con sus sueños, cada cual.      with her dreams, each one.
Con la esperanza adelante,     With hope before them
con los recuerdos detrás.         And memories behind

. . .

Y así, seguimos andando                And so we go on,
curtidos de soledad.                        Hardened by loneliness
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos  And inside us, we carry our dead
pa que nadie quede atrás.              So that nobody’s left behind

Yo tengo tantos hermanos             I have so many brothers and sisters
que no los puedo contar . . .          that I cannot count them all . . .

In the end, interpreting cultural phenomena across languages challenges us to a subtlety of understanding even beyond what translation usually demands.  Things that look the same can be fundamentally different.

Copyright ©2011-2012 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
This essay originally appeared at http://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011. It is being republished this year with  an accompanying Spanish translation.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", bilingual, certificado, certified, cross-cultural, cultura, culture, Davis, Día de los Muertos, Día de Muertos, English, español, Halloween, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, interpretación, intérprete, interpreter, interpreting, Julián, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

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

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