Een fijn voorbeeld van het Nederspaans in het Geheugen van Nederland: ‘k Ben een onverschwartze Espagnolos Kijk naar mijn bolos, als roet zoo zwart Zie ik een aardig meisje met mijn blikkos Voel ik de prikkos, hier in mijn hart ‘k Ben van beroep torero in Sevilla Ik steek de bandrilla de stieren in d’r…
I’ve been translating quite a lot of elderly Flemish over the past few months. Here’s an excerpt from some manuscript memoirs found in the municipal archives of Ditverstaanzetochniet: An ivory trader on the Congo River has been suffering severe depression as a result of harrassment by an inquisitive steamboat captain speaking defective French. He decides…
I know much more about Maghrebis and Africans in colonial Spain than in the period up to 1936 and I’d like to correct that. Any books or articles out there? I’d be most grateful if you’d talk to me here.
Or rather, to get slightly richer rather quicker than would otherwise have been the case. He gets a monthly Spanish government pension of €3. One of a series of profiles in El Mundo.
Someone just quoted me a bit of Clément Marot I didn’t know (OK, let’s be honest: I’d didn’t even know Marot): En tant qu’Ouy et Nenny se dira, Par l’univers le monde me lira. Which Leigh Hunt (The Companion, 1828) translates as: As long as Love says Yes and No, The universe shall read Marot.…
A Herrero Mayor, Artesanía y prevaricación del castellano (1931): “En general, los vicios populares más arraigados se traducen en permanentes desviaciones semánticas, falsa correlación del tiempo de los verbos, barbarismos de construcción (italianismos, sobre todo), en el uso impropio de las preposiciones, trueque de accidentes en sustantivos comunes, ecolalia y empleo muy frecuente de voces,…
Here’s Samuel Griswold Goodrich on Europe after the Goths in A History of All Nations, from the Earliest Periods to the Present Time (1856): When the wind had dispersed the dust of these countless armies; when the smoke of these blazing cities had ascended to the sky; when the vapors, arising from these murderous battlefields,…
The Auk: Quarterly Journal of Ornithology (1876): “At 6.09 am the female went on the nest, while the male continued to sing loudly from his perch, making no move to escort her on.”
It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860): M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal…
From John Drummond Hay, Morocco and the Moors: Western Barbary, Its Wild Tribes and Savage Animals (1861): There are descendants of the Moorish families of Granada now residing in Tetuan and Fas [Fez], who still preserve the keys, and it is said also the title-deeds, of the houses of their Mauro-Spanish ancestors, in the hope…