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2012-11-23 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

December, snow, and romance: translating a month

Dear reader,

December brings with it Christmas, Hanukkah, the beginning of winter, and year’s end on the 31st. As we’ll see, it also has interesting romantic associations.

December wasn’t always the end of the year: as the first syllable of its name testifies, it was the tenth month of the calendar in remote Roman antiquity. Indeed, in the Julian calendar predominant until some 400 years ago, New Year’s Day came in March: either the 1st or, in England and elsewhere, the 25th. Later (perhaps around 400-500 BCE), two more months were added to the calendar: January and February. January became the first month of the year, but March continued to be considered the real start of the year all the way up to early modern times: according to the country, either the first of March, the 15th, or the 25th. So December, somehow, continued to retain its status as ‘tenth month’.

Bacall and Bogart, an immortal May-December pair.

 

As for the month’s snowy connotations (aside from being rarer and rarer in Northern latitudes), these make little sense in the Southern hemisphere, where December marks the start of summer.

Another association that falls flat in the South: the metaphor “a May-December romance” where  May (springtime) stands for youth, December (winter) old age. Maxwell Anderson’s 1938 lyric to Kurt Weill’s “September Song” builds a bittersweet love story on the foundation of those two months: “It’s a long, long way from May to December/And the days grow short when you reach September”.

In places like Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, literature oscillates between the system of metaphor inherited from Spain (as in an adolescent girl’s  quince abriles, fifteen Aprils) and new adaptations.

Uruguayan lyricist Federico Silva’s 1935 tango, No nos veremos más (Adiós), movingly deploys just such a new poetic coding of the seasons.  The man, sadly convinced that his relationship with a much younger woman cannot last, sings: “Tu luz de verano me soleó el otoño…/No puedo engañarte, mi adiós es sincero/Tu estás en enero, mi abril ya pasó”: Your summer light warmed my autumn…/I cannot deceive you, my farewell is sincere/For you it’s January. my April is long past.

Julio Sosa, ‘El Varón del Tango’ sings “No nos veremos más”

Willie Nelson sings “September Song”

 

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

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

This essay was originally written for the December 2, 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.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", age, amores, canciones, certificado, certified, cultura, culture, Davis, December, diciembre, estaciones, Julián, letra, love, lyrics, meses, metáforas, metaphors, months, Pablo, Pablo Julián Davis, romance, romances, seasons, songs, tango, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, youth

2012-11-22 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Thanksgiving: translating the name, tracing the meaning(s)

The fourth Thursday in November is here, and with it a holiday largely peculiar to the United States, yet at the same time universal in its origins as a harvest celebration. Thanksgiving Day, or, in Spanish, Día de Acción de Gracias.

Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting, Freedom From Want, used an idealized scene of a family Thanksgiving meal to illustrate one of the “Four Freedoms” enunciated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the values for which the country was at war.

As an annual celebration, it can be traced back continuously not to the early 17th century and the first encounters between English colonists and Massachusetts natives, but rather to 1863, in the midst of the US Civil War. Before then, various presidents had declared a Day of Thanksgiving in certain years, but it was not an annual ritual. In fact, the third president, Thomas Jefferson, had declined entirely to do so, believing it a violation of the separation of church and state for the chief executive to urge prayer on the citizenry.

To many ears, Día de Acción de Gracias has the ring of merely an awkward, too-literal translation of the English name. Other versions can be found in the Spanish-speaking world: Día de las Gracias(Day of Thanks), Día de Gracias (Day of Thanks, more briefly expressed), and even the tongue-in-cheek Día del Pavo (Turkey Day).

In fact, acción de graciasis the Spanish term (as is ”thanksgiving” in English), in both Catholic and Protestant traditions, for a special Mass or service, as well as a prayer of thanks to God.  In other words, long before the invention of this holiday in the United States, a theological and liturgical concept existed, along with a personal religious practice, of that name.

“A Soldier’s Thanksgiving” was the Saturday Evening Post’s cover for Dec. 8, 1917, the US’s first year of direct involvement in the ‘Great War’. J.C. Leyendecker was the artist. The military connection with Thanksgiving is one of the holiday’s many facets.

 

In English, the phrase to say grace (as before a meal) used to be in the plural: before Shakespeare’s time, one spoke of graces, whose meaning was simply the giving of thanks.  That older plural mirrors exactly the Spanish use, as it still exists: gracias.

In the English colonies, some years saw the authorities (whether civil or religious) declare a Day of Thanksgiving marked by prayers and feasting. In certain other years, in which bad harvests, plagues, or other misfortunes were understood to be signs of divine wrath at the community, leaders decreed days of penitence and fasting.

This mix of gratitude and humility was reflected in the later presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving, from the Civil War forward. Along with thanks to God, it was customary to express regret for national errors and a desire to mend our ways.  (An earlier proclamation, from George Washington in 1789, urged the people to “unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions . . . “) Somehow, by the last quarter of the 20th century, it no longer occurred to US presidents to include such a note of remorse.

The Thanksgiving holiday has assumed the widest imaginable range of forms throughout its history, and from region to region. A few examples will serve to illustrate. In the South, the day was, historically, strongly linked to hunting by the menfolk, and later an association arose with football. In New York City until well after 1900, it was a Carnavalesque occasion with more than a hint of Halloween, in which groups of children and youths masked and costumed in the raiments of poverty or danger would wander the streets of the city demanding treats from residents and passers-by, under threat of playing tricks. This sort of urban mischief led to a movement to tame or soften the holiday, making of it a tribute to middle-class domesticity. And the symbolic inclusion of members of the armed forces posted overseas, especially in wartime, has been a feature of every Thanksgiving going back to the war with Spain in 1898.

Giant balloon of the Tin Man character from The Wizard of Oz (a novelty, as the movie had premiered just the year before), Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, New York City, 1940. Commercialism has been a feature of Thanksgiving for at least a century.

 

In addition to its diverse forms of celebration, the holiday has always generated the most varied interpretations and meanings. On the one hand, it elicits the affection of many people for its lack of commercialism, and for the absence of material gift-giving from its rituals: quite the contrary, its center is occupied by a meal shared with family, friends, and persons alone or in need. Nevertheless, for over a hundred years now, Thanksgiving (or at least the day immediately after) has been understood to mark the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Leading department stores began sponsoring Thanksgiving Day parades in the early 20th century (Macy’s became the most famous, but wasn’t the first, an honor reserved for Gimbel’s parade which debuted in Philadelphia in 1920).

The holiday has also been widely seen as essentially religious in character: the thanks are given to God. Another perspective, though, is one of a more diffuse sort of gratitude, whether towards nature, one’s parents, or others. This debate is impossible to resolve: the remotest origins are doubtless religious, as Jefferson understood in opposing the idea of  a presidential proclamation. At the same time, the ever-changing, protean nature of the holiday has made of it, just as clearly, a celebration that is to a great extent secular.

Another contradiction relates to Native Americans or, as most of them prefer to call themselves, American Indians. On the hand, we note a widespread belief that Thanksgiving Day is, at least in part, an occasion of gratitude towards the native inhabitants who helped the earliest colonists survive the harsh winter in a land of whose agriculture they were utterly ignorant. On the other hand, there are those who see the holiday as an affirmation of the conquest of the American Indian and even a ritual sacrifice in which the turkey symbolizes the original human inhabitants.

The modern origin of Thanksgiving Day during the Civil War, and by the hand of President Lincoln, offers a clue for understanding another peculiarity of the holiday: its rejection, into the early decades of the 20th century, by much of the South as a Yankee imposition. Even earlier, abolitionists had used Thanskgiving as an occasion for sermons against slavery.  These antecedents together helped solidify a long-standing Southern White disdain for the holiday, in the past.

Another vital connotation of Thanksgiving Day is that of homecoming. For a people as mobile as that of the United States, the holiday had by the middle of the 19th century become the occasion for the reencounter of the country’s scattered sons and daughters with the homes of their childhood and with now aged parents.  Currier & Ives’s famous lithograph of 1867, Home to Thanksgiving, made this association visually memorable. The homecoming theme, more broadly, is presented with both comedy and pathos in the 1987 feature film, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, viewing of which has become a staple of the holiday in many homes.

Currier and Ives’s famous lithograph from 1867, crystallizes in its snowy, rural scene a notion deeply rooted in the culture of the United States: Thanksgiving as an occasion for a restlessly mobile, scattered population to return to the family homestead.

 

The endless debates about the origins of Thanksgiving Day underscore its importance as a national festival.  Symbolically, it’s understood as a performance of the very beginnings of colonization, which it ritually reenacts. Massachusetts, Maine, Florida, and other states (then colonies) dispute over where “the first Thanksgiving” happened.  This search for a genesis is a chimera. For thanksgiving, with a small ‘t’, is a gesture whose origins are lost in the mists of time. One might as well search for the first embrace, or the first wedding.  Anyway, none of the various thanksgiving feasts that occurred in this or that colony can show an uninterrupted continuity up to the present national celebration.

Today, despite its diverse and sometimes contradictory facets, Thanksgiving Day remains an indispensable date on the country’s calendar. And, as the turkey tamales, turkey curry, turkey paella, and countless other variants bear witness on millions of family tables, the holiday has proven singularly supple in its ability to welcome and incorporate generation after generation of immigrants.

Here Disney combines the sentimental “thanks, Native Americans” approach to Thanksgiving with some good, old-fashioned cheesecake.

 

Sentimentally, but with much truth, it has been said that Thanksgiving Day is a kind of national communion. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine another day of the year devoted, for almost every one of the more than 300 million who live in the United States, to a single, shared activity. The elements of simplicity, homecoming, and unity-in-diversity that mark El Día de Acción de Gracias would seem to assure its continued relevance in national culture.Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.

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: "Pablo J. Davis", Acción de Gracias, America, American, certiticado, cultura, culture, Davis, fiesta, holiday, Latin, Latino, Latinoamérica, origen, origin, Pablo, palabras, Thanksgiving, traducción, traductor, translation, translator, words

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

2012-11-18 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.

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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.

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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

2012-10-09 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: Of “piropos”, praise, and pick-up lines

Dear readers,

An attractive young woman walks gracefully down the street, inspiring a gentleman standing at a storefront to call out, “¿Qué culpa tiene el árbol de haber nacido en el campo, y qué culpa mi corazón por amarte tanto?” [A tree stands on the ground where it was born, my heart by hopeless love is torn].

That rather old-fashioned scene features a free rendering into English of the sort of elegant, even poetic, compliment known in Spanish as a piropo (original meaning: a ruby or red garnet). This gallant form of praise  for  a  lady’s  charms,  though  scarcer  than  fifty or a hundred years   ago   on   the   streets   of   Zacatecas,   Ponce,  or Maracaibo (gentlemen’s remarks to ladies in the public thoroughfare now tending to the somewhat less  poetic),  still remains part of  everyday Hispanic/Latin American culture.

http://tinyurl.com/tuejanica2 offers some vintage piropos along with poetry on the subject and reflections on the waning, if not outright extinction, of the custom.

Translators  find  a  particular  challenge  and fascination  in  words  like  piropo  that name a concept either non-existent in the other language, or not central enough to the culture to have any simple means of expression. Dictionaries offer us either explanations that don’t exactly roll smoothly  off   the   tongue   (the Oxford Concise’s  “flirtatious/flattering  comment”),  or expressions that lose the spice and charm of the original (the Espasa-Calpe’s rather flat “compliment”).Some even use the still more pedestrian translation “line,” as in something a fellow might routinely use in a bar—likely far less poetic or gallant than what’s meant by  piropo.

Your thoughts, readers? Is there a good English equivalent for piropo—the word itself, or the custom it names?

¡Buenas palabras!

Copyright ©2012 Pablo J. Davis. Se reservan todos los derechos. All Rights Reserved. A version of this essay was first published, alongside its Spanish version, in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 19 August 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: "Pablo J. Davis", America, American, certified, compliment, cultura, culture, Davis, English, español, flirting, hispana, Hispanic, Hispano, inglés, Interfluency, Julián, Latin American, latina, Latino, latinoamericana, line, male-female, Pablo, pick-up, piropo, Spanish, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

2012-09-15 by Pablo J. Davis Leave a Comment

Mysteries & Enigmas of Translation: Taking and giving a test, and other mirrors

Dear readers,

It’s a pleasure to begin this series of explorations into language, and particularly into the curiosities and riddles of translating between English and Spanish.  I invite you to explore with me, starting with some cases of “mirrors” in which the same concept is expressed in opposite ways in the two languages.

One curious case: giving or taking a test.  In English, the teacher gives the test, the student takes it.  The Spanish situation is more complex.  In some countries (e.g. Peru, Chile, Argentina), it’s reversed: El estudiante da (gives) el examen, el maestro lo toma (takes it).

This isn’t because the student hands the completed exam to the teacher; rather, the logic is historical: in past times, oral examination was much more common in schools.  The teacher tomaba (took) the exam, in much the way that a judge would tomar declaración (hear or receive testimony).

In other countries, usage can be different.  In Mexico, for instance, the teacher usually da (gives) the exam, which the student tiene (has) or toma (takes).

However, in formal Spanish everywhere, students rinden (give) an exam.

Another mirror that can lead to confusion has to do with the word substitute.  In English, “to substitute pepper for salt” means to use pepper instead of salt.  In Spanish, the mirror sentence sustituir pimienta por sal means to drop pepper and use salt.

Moving from one language to another is fascinating—but sometimes traps of confusion lie in wait if we’re not careful!

Buenas palabras,

Pablo

This essay was first published, alongside its Spanish version, in La Prensa Latina, Memphis, Tennessee, on 22 July 2012.

Filed Under: Interflows Language+Culture Blog Tagged With: certified, cultura, culture, dar, Davis, English, español, exam, examen, give, idiomas, inglés, Julián, language, lenguaje, Memphis, Mid-South, Pablo, Spanish, take, test, tomar, traducción, traductor, translation, translator

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