Oh what a tangoed web...

At my first session of psychoanalysis I said “I have this image of myself as being stuck in a well.” Because of my accent, my analyst thought I had a Jonah complex. Yesterday a friend sent me a link to a George Orwell essay called Inside the Whale. Very interesting. Written in 1940; and therewithin I find “cold snap”.

I am used to brief bouts of intensely cold weather which I had alway referred to as cold spells, and I had the impression that I had only come across the expression “cold snap” recently. I decided it was somehow “wrong” and not to be adopted, or at the very least suspect because recent. Interesting to see the brain at work, rejecting the unknown, even in someone who rationally and consciously embraces it.

I was thinking about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a metaphor for desire, which, according to BM, is either prohibited or impossible. When part of you goes all out to get what you want, natural forces are unleashed against you. The old man caught the huge fish, but the sharks ripped it apart before he could get it home.

Prendre une décision in French, but in English, do we take them or make them?

Google is beginning to annoy me. I started to find strange cases of synchronicity; I searched for an article to buy online and the next day I was working away and saw adverts for that article on my screen… What a coincidence, I thought, until I realised that my browser was constantly spangled with articles I had looked at in online stores.

To make matters worse, be it Google or Firefox, someone has “enhanced” the search function. Used to be when I searched for a word or expression, the search box offered me up my previous similar searches which served as a useful aide-memoire. Now the search box offers me other people’s searches, or searches that it deems useful, which are of no use to me at all and further pollute my working environment. Because I am fascinated by the written word, I see combinations of words in their proposed search phrases and think really? Does that exist? Or what does that mean? And off I go on somebody else’s search, neglecting my own and wasting time...

... which, as we all know, is of the essence… As a translator, my main, bread & butter bulk per word rate has dropped 30% since the euro was introduced. Which means that to maintain a similar standard of living I should be working 30% faster… But I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers, etc. The competition seems somehow unfair.

 

Prosody,  Phrasé

Phrasing, Prosaic (the antonyms include pedestrian (belisha beacon) and I want to include poetic).

Typo of the day: pubic relations

Unfortunately, I learnt the meaning of a new French word:

détonner = chanter faux

Now, chanter faux = to sing out of tune, or off-key, but I can’t actually find that as a straight definition for détonner, and instead I find "to jar, to be out of place… " Oops! Some of my notes were slightly out of place. There are no grey areas in singing – it is either in tune or it isn’t. Our choir mistress made me laugh after a particularly laborious passage of a rehearsal when she said “c’est presque ça”. Which means we were rubbish.

I’ve always been proud of my heritage and the pivotal role Scots affirm they have played in everything, but even I found this amusing:

“In another attempt to circumvent its dependence on Chinese tea, the East India Company sent Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to China to steal and smuggle out of China tea plants, which were then taken to India, where by the end of the 19th century they matured and produced Indian tea.”

I watched Merrill Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. Sad to say I worked for and with a woman like that in Paris once. I admired her energy and precision until one day I heard her demolishing someone on the phone to save her skin.

"la raison d’état de soi-même"

“The national interest, often referred to by the French term raison d'État, is a country's goals and ambitions whether economic, military, or cultural.”

First tango in Graz

“Police are not treating the case as foul play” I read in an online newspaper. Foul play somehow amused me. I hadn’t come across the expression for a long time. It reeks of Sherlock Holmes. From Sherlock to Shylock and the pound of flesh no-one wants to pay.

In Shakespeare I find:
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Was that allowed, even in His day? Is there a name for writing in a mixture of two or more languages?

Marseille turned out to be an astonishing city, with lots of shops and sea air. In parts it seems quite similar to Paris, but with people who give the impression they don’t mind you being there.


The film festival was a wondrous mixture of pellicules. Some were moving, some left me indifferent and some made me want to vaporise the author with a Martian heat ray. I can be quite categorical at times. If I don’t like something I tend to think it shouldn’t be allowed to exist, until I remember that people can have different tastes and mine doesn’t necessarily hold good for the known universe.

I was laughing with the team about the fact that the previous year no fewer than two out of the four films whose subtitles I converted into English had very long sequences of spiders playing with flies stuck in their web – an apt metaphor for the subtitle translator, thought I. The audience is free to stand up and walk out of the cinema, but the translator has to watch every frame. Just as we are sometimes the only people who REALLY read what we are translating because translation requires a grasp, a take on what is intended. Skimming doesn’t cut it.

English subtitles are required for the films entered in the international competition. The format was two lines of 35 characters each. It’s not a question of straight forward translation because the eye reads at a slower pace than the ear deciphers so the words have to be summarised if there is a lot of dialogue.

*
Naples is the last city
to hang out sheets on balconies.
*

There was washing on the balconies opposite my town centre hotel window. We subtitlers discussed this and someone said there were gated communities in America where hanging washing outside is prohibited.

tabula rasa. Guenon – this is a female monkey and a French surname but I could not establish a connection between the two.

Imbroglio - This word came to mind as im-brogue-lio but in fact the “g” is not supposed to be pronounced.
“Word History: The history of today's word has been through a bit of an imbroglio itself. It was borrowed recently from Italian. It is related semantically to embroil, taken from the French embrouiller "to tangle, confuse", a cousin of Italian imbroglio. In fact, in Old English, broil meant "to brawl". It only began to surrender that meaning in Middle English when French brûler "to burn" was borrowed and converted into broil, now with its current sense of baking.”

In primary school my two problem words were foliage – I picked it up as foilage and couldn’t get rid of the pronunciation for a while – and rogue – which I imagined was pronounced “rogg-ewe” until I heard it spoken for the first time at the headmaster’s daughter’s birthday party and realised I was very wrong.

The headmaster taught me to fold a letter.

There was a film about pigs flying and the French translator was flummoxed – quand les poules auront des dents is the rough equivalent. And there was a brilliant title for the narcissist, a lady who had stuck a camera down her throat to film her vocal chords and called the film something like "pictures of my voice going round in my head".

There was tango in front of the Opera House and on Tuesday nights tango in the alley in front of the Gymnase Theatre. The shoes are absolutely fascinating… I tried to draw them - the result was painful.






When I recently went to visit Sylvia in Graz, she took me to her tango club, and I spent a pleasant evening foot spotting – ankle spotting. Dietmar suddenly announced that the music had slowed down and I could try, and before I knew it I was “walking” a tango. It is a great feeling. The people in the Graz club travel to cities like Berlin or Barcelona to tango in the street.

Coincidentally, today, Thomas, who set off from Lombez with Phebus to walk sur les traces du rideau de fer is at Sylvia’s house in Graz.

If the shoe fits

A few years ago, there was a door in Glasgow airport arrivals corridor with a sign on it saying: “this door is alarmed”. It always made me feel sorry for the poor door. Now I wonder if I am alarmed or if the news is actually more worrying than usual. Britain is claiming a chunk of Alaska - we need more frozen assets? A new planet has been discovered - not alarming in itself but given the current prevalent mentality on this one I can’t imagine it being shared out equitably. Rivalry, mainly unconscious, seems to be insurmountable for most of us siblings.

Whatever the case, it won’t do any harm to sign a petition against France’s introduction of DNA testing for family reunification.

I watched a video in the Guardian the other day of the police following Jean Charles De Menezes into Stockwell tube station, and then of his dead body on the floor of the carriage. The CCTV footage in between, i.e. the actual killing, mysteriously went missing. We see the back of Jean Charles as he goes down the escalator to the platform. We know he picked up a newspaper before he got on the escalator. He looks like any other commuter. The escalator is swallowed up by the tunnel. Then, singly and in groups, the armed pursuers go down the escalator after him. The result is horrific. Suffocating. No way out. You can feel the unstoppable heavy machinery of human error grinding into action. Seven bullets to the head while restrained.

*************

I have added a link to Laura Gonzales, who is lucky enough to be living in Glescka. Funnily enough, when I went to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (her home town) I did in fact come back with several pairs of shoes... The Spaniards certainly know what they're doing when there's art afoot.