Legacies

Advertisement, p. 10 of the Tuesday, May 19th El País.

Always fun to check up on the home front in a Spanish daily. This is a different angle from what I think is that January luncheon with all living presidents, photo taken in the Oval Office, Obama then still the president-elect. (Though if it is that photograph, Jimmy Carter, who was standing to the right of Clinton, has been cut out entirely). Each president conveniently labeled with his accomplishments, next to Obama’s as-yet blank yellow circle. The ad is for a daily political talk radio program. (Click for a larger view of the text.)

George Bush is remembered for signing the treaty that ended the Cold War – Él y Gorbachov firmaron un pacto de cooperación, poniendo fin a la guerra fría en 1991.

Clinton, for his popularity – Terminó su mandato con un 66% de aprobación. El más alto desde la 2ª guerra mundial.

Carter is, by Spaniards, not remembered at all.

And our most recent office-holder? Interestingly, he’s not even gifted with one of his legacies as president – the bubble remembers him as Governor of Texas: Como gobernador, tiene el record de ejecuciones – He holds the record in executions, highest in toda la historia de Estados Unidos.

Now, speaking of legacies, isn’t this an odd sort of thing to say? Everything else the man did or was during his presidency taken as a given, I mean – wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, one election decided by judges, torture instrumentalized as foreign policy, a major American city left to drown, etc, etc, etc, etc. The obvious stuff.

But what do you do with the obvious stuff when it’s almost unsayable? You can’t argue with the number of people executed during his term of governor, even as the number of Iraqi civilians we’ve killed continues to be debated in terms of orders of magnitude. All of which puts me to mind of these pieces at the excellent academic blog zunguzungu, and the exchange  he quotes from an English teacher in the Sudan:

“So,” I said at length. “I hesitate to ask this question, but what is America famous for?”

“Killing people,” said one young lad sitting at the back, without hesitation.

Obama & Bush are the only presidents in the photograph wearing flag pins.

Mixtape

 

A typewriter lends an odd kind of official cast to anything you label with it – and more things than you think can be spooled into the carriage: post-it notes, pieces of cardpaper, envelopes, stationary of varieties & thicknesses impossible for a commercial laser printer.

This is yet another version of my History of American Music mix, made for the music teacher at my school. I taught a lesson in American traditional & folk music that I made up to complement the unit in the textbook, which was all about Spanish traditional music (and so virtually impossible to translate usefully – all of the teachable vocabulary were loanwords); this mixtape I made after the fact, because the teacher asked me what some of the songs were, which is why most of it is outliers. Because I don’t have access to a lot of music out here, most of the track choices are less carefully weighed exemplars & more of a scramble to give a general impression of the sweep of things.

I have no ready explanation as to why the cover is Marvin Gaye in a sailor hat, but it was the only usefully American musical image I could find in last week’s El País Sunday magazine.

EL PAÍS, domingo 22 de marzo

I become ever-more ambivalent about reducing a print medium to collage, but it’s so difficult to fit the words in – and how many of my readers speak Spanish, anyway?

In this week’s El País, co-fraternities in Sevilla (who sponsor & carry on their shoulders the platforms & floats during Holy Week) issue a joint declaration stopping the display of anti-abortion signs during Semana Santa. The search for the body of Marta, the young woman whose murder at the hands of her ex-boyfriend has transfixed all of Spain, continues in Sevilla’s garbage dump, after the murderer admits that he did not put her body in the river Guadilquivir. The corruption investigation into key national members of the PP, the Partido Popular (right-wing opposition party to the socialist PSOE) continues, and Spain offers more troops to be deployed in Kosovo & Afghanistan.

The FMLN triumphs in El Salvador, & the paper surveys ex-guerillas in political power in Latin America. There are massive public demonstrations in Naples against the mafia. Isreali soldiers are wearing t-shirts that feature a pregnant Arab woman in crosshairs with the subtitle “1 Shot, 2 Kills.” An editorial by Timothy Gartan Ash, translated from The Guardian, compares Britain’s diplomatic strategy re: America to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves:

Maneras impecables; una sonrisa discreta; siempre, perfecta lealtad en público; mientras que, en privado, no se deja de murmurar: “¿Es eso prudente, señor?”.

But, he continues, this has been a national strategy with fewer benefits every day, and one with no remedy in the circumstance that the boss, Bertie Wooster, goes insane:

¿Qué hace Jeeves cuando Wooster empieza a torturar a gente en un cuarto trasero o cuando hace que un carnicero marroquí se dedique a cortar penes en su nombre? ¿Qué hace cuando Wooster se embarca en lo que Jeeves considera una guerra peligrosa y equivocada? Por lo que sabemos hasta ahora, la respuesta del Jeeves británico fue murmurar, alternativamente, “¿puedo ayudarle, señor?” y “¿es esto prudente, señor?”.

Having gone to the Guardian’s website & looked up the original, I think I actually like the Spanish translation better.

Room with a view

I have the luck to be in Spain for the new Almodóvar film, Los abrazos rotos. This is the view from the desk in the hotel room where he wrote the first complete draft of the script.

A friend of mine wrote me in a letter a few months ago, “[Writers] aren’t as dependent on good light as painters, but it can help.”

EL PAÍS, domingo 8 de marzo

Above, the Sunday, 8 March El País boiled down to the size of two postcards.

Pérez Roque is named by the epithet, “talibán fidelista,” a Madrid designer coins the plural adjective “sexys” in an interview in order to make it line up with Spanish grammar, & the Spanish title of There Will Be Blood is Pozos de ambición.

An article in the peach-colored economics section uses a giant panoramic photograph of the olive groves outisde of Martos to illustrate its article on rural agriculture – Martos being the pueblo outside of Jaén where I was nine days ago, in a pleasant tiled courtyard with tables set with cups of different oil varieties, bread, water, & cubed apples, touring a traditional olive oil plantation.

I took notes again this week on the English loanwords italicized & used – this being the Sunday edition, I thought I’d net an even a bigger catch.

There were the usual suspects: Words for technology (web, online, banner [ad], blog, wi-fi), for celebrity & music (fan, celebrity, tour manager, memorabilia, shows).

Words filling up the business section – bonus, broker, cash flow, freelance, headhunters, hedge fund, marketing, outsourcing, rating, stock, subprime.

Words for consumption, fashion, nightlife – after hours, blazer, chaqueta de bomber, duty free, fitness manager, gentleman, glamour, grunge, indie, “it girl”, jeans, light [as in diet], “look”, outlets, play rate, pub, sexy, skate, sponsor, videoclip, video de aerobic, vintage.

Words for media – country, western, folk [music], thriller, “making of”, noir [instead of estilo negro], porno.

And the occasional outliers: “bloguero” [for blogger], dominatrix, doping, noodles, porridge, sheriff.

EL PAÍS, sábado 14 febrero

Reading El País, Saturday edition, 14th February -

El mundo es un pañuelo.

The world is a handkerchief? What does this mean? Why does the back page columnist use it as his first sentence? It may be an expression, but I can’t imagine its meaning, not even from context. The declaration is too blank, too absolute – taken as a given.

It reminds me of the first & last sentences of Erik Fosnes Hansen’s Tales of Protection (I looked for the originals in Norwegian, couldn’t find them) - “Life is a bird.” Eventually, he elaborates:

Life is a bird. And you are the branch that sways back and forth.

Actor de doblaje. Constatino Romano, still unwell; but his condition improves.

Who is Constatino Romano? “Como actor de doblaje, está considerado uno de los profesionales más prestigiosos. Es la voz de Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger en la trilogía de Terminator, y Roger Moore.”

Dubbed movies & television are omnipresent in Spain (& one of the reasons why English pedagogy is more difficult than in northern Europe). Spaniards speak with pride of their actores de doblaje as the best in the world, particularly during the 70s. I distinctly remember an Almodóvar film (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]?) where the principal action took place in a dubbing studio.

Imagine a world where Roger Moore and Clint Eastwood speak with the same voice.

Spanish friends tell me that when they get pirated DVDs from South America they’re distracted because all of the voices of the actors have changed; different dubbing studios.

Multilingual films are whitewashed beyond recognition; in Babel, even the Mexican voices (I’ve been told) are dubbed over with Spanish accents. In Vicky Christina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz speaks in Spanish over her own voice speaking in English; it goes from a bilingual movie to a monolingual one, & Javier Bardem shouting, “English! Speak English!” loses . . . everything.

A list of all English loanwords used, in italics, in the 14 February El País:

blog – chat – dixie – establishment – ferry – glamour – golden boy – hippy – kosher – lobby [as in lobbyist] – lounge – marines – mass media – marketing – merchandising – performer – online – resort – rhythm and blues – road movies – rock and roll – singular food [culinary movement] – spa – stand [as in booth] – vintage