translation – Page 10 – don't confuse the narrator

contradictionary

In a story on 20 Minutos, the on-line version of one of Spain’s free newspapers, The Secretary of the Real Academia Española, Darío Villanueva is quoted as having said:

“El Diccionario no puede ser políticamente correcto porque la lengua sirve para amar, pero también para insultar. No podemos suprimir las palabras que usamos cuando nos enfadamos o cuando somos injustos, arbitrarios o canallas.” *

I find this odd, as I thought the whole point of the RAE was prescription not description.
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‘a tower to the sun’

castillos en el aire – ilusiones lisonjeras con poco o ningún fundamento

I wonder how many Spaniards realise that as well as building castles in the air, English speakers also build castles in Spain.

Perhaps more to the point, I wonder why we do.

Brewer tells me that

[…] air-castles were called by the French Châteaux d’Espagne because Spain has no châteaux.

I wonder who told him that yarn.
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benchmark

I am amused by this stone bench up beyond the bull ring in Arenas de San Pedro, Castilla y León, central Spain.

Well, not so much amused by the bench, but by the engraving on it, which seems to be extraordinarily apt:

Banco de Castilla no longer exists as an independent bank, but I am glad the benches it sponsored have not been removed. They are indeed bancos de Castilla – Castilian benches.

polish/spanish/english: a few thoughts on poetry & other writing

The revista literaria El Malpensante has an interesting article based on the column written in a Polish newspaper for 30 years by the Nobel prize winner Wislawa Szymborska.

In Cómo escribir and cómo no escribir poesía they have selected a few of the replies Szymborska made to readers who aspired to write poetry. Most of the article is interesting, but I have selected just two snippets.

The first, chosen because it ties in with my interest in translation:

Para H. O., de Poznan, un posible traductor
El traductor no está obligado a serle fiel al texto únicamente. Debe dejar ver la belleza de la poesía conservando su forma y reteniendo, en la medida de lo posible, el estilo y el espíritu de la época.

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situation critical

In the UK, I think people talk of the ‘recession’, but here in Spain we’re not mealy-mouthed – no tenemos pelos en la lengua – so it’s a full-blown ‘crisis’.

Despite the world’s financial problems, though, I’ve been fortunate to have a reasonable amount of work, and I’d begun to hope that things were getting better for other people, too. So I was a bit taken aback to receive this in an email from a translation agency this week (my emphasis): Continue reading “situation critical”