As the evenings draw in, the Arenys de Mar sensimilla syndicate has taken time off from the plantation to post another shambling Gran Armada-wreck of nationalist historical revisionism. (It’s dated 2006, but this is the first time it’s turned up in my reader, so…) As is customary, our scenario is back-to-the-future: a massive 15th century…
One of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, but as far as I know it is only in the following passage from La corte de los milagros, a novel set in the period when Borrow was in Spain, that he refers…
Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…
From the Diario de Barcelona, quoted in Manuel Martínez de Morentin, Estudios filológicos (1857): —¿Qué se entiende por España? —Una Nacion como otra cualquiera, pero con la particularidad de haber de todo menos españoles. —¿En qué climas se halla? —En tres; frio, caliente y templado: en invierno es cuando regularmente se siente el frio, lo…
This Cádiz lexicon says (also here) that quillo is used indiscriminately to attract attention, rather like “¡Oye!” in Spanish and its English cognate, “Oi!”, or, alternatively, like the English “Love”. In Barcelona (and presumably in other Spanish cities) quillo is also used derogatively, to express perceived age, ethnic and class distinctions, rather like the Spanish/Catalan…
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