A cowboy mouse: Hello you! let me out! and don’t catch me like a trout

Francisco Gabilondo Soler has been denounced for his song, Ratón Vaquero, from the Cri-Cri show (more here), in which a Yankee mouse demands his freedom from the trap into which he has fallen:

The offending lyrics in full:

What the heck is this house
for a manly cowboy mouse?
Hello you! let me out!
and don’t catch me like a trout.

Unlike the snitch, I don’t think that piscatorial linguistics are at issue here. You can catch trout with a line, or if you’re really clever by tickling (Beaumont & Fletcher: “Be a Baron and a bold one: leave off your tickling of young heirs like Trouts, and let thy Chimnies smoke.“), but then there are also traps:

So the mouse, like the inhabitants of Numantia, is merely complaining that he has been taken by fiendish cunning rather than in fair combat. The previous couplet may for all I know be dodgy, but let’s not waste all day trying to pick holes in Mexico’s greatest poet.

Similar posts

Back soon

Published
Last updated 31/05/2018
Categories Uncategorized

Barcelona (1399):

English language (462):

Föcked Translation (414): I posted to a light-hearted blog called Fucked Translation over on Blogger from 2007 to 2016, when I was often in Barcelona. Its original subtitle was "What happens when Spanish institutions and businesses give translation contracts to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London and only charges 0.05€/word." I never actually did much Spanish-English translation (most of my work is from Dutch, French and German) but I was intrigued and amused by the hubristic Spanish belief, then common, that nepotism and quality went hand in hand, and by the nemeses that inevitably followed.
Warning: file_get_contents(https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=extracts&format=json&exsentences=2&exlimit=1&exintro=&explaintext=&exsectionformat=plain&titles=Föcked%20Translation): Failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 400 Invalid HTTP Request in /home/u762788070/domains/elorganillero.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen-child/functions.php on line 321

Warning: Attempt to read property "query" on null in /home/u762788070/domains/elorganillero.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen-child/functions.php on line 324

Warning: Attempt to read property "pages" on null in /home/u762788070/domains/elorganillero.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen-child/functions.php on line 324

Warning: foreach() argument must be of type array|object, null given in /home/u762788070/domains/elorganillero.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen-child/functions.php on line 324

Spain (1881):

Spanish language (504):

Translation (788):


Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *