African-ish bands have been the talk of Andalusian ports since Cervantes. In 1935 the carnival association Orquesta Senegalesa didn’t win any prizes with this song: Aquí está la Orquesta Senegalesa que tocamos las notas con gran limpieza, llegamos desde Londres en un tranvía a visitar la tierra de la alegría. Hemos visto mujeres a cual…
Via EFDL, El Plagio Literario. Quim Monzó, Luis Racionero and Lucía Etxebarría apparently see themselves as practicians of intertextuality rather than plagiarists. But surely virtually no Spanish readers will have read or even heard of their sources, Courrier International, Gilbert Murray and Antonio Colinas. And so, if they don’t indicate their debt for such an…
Ah! “Oranges, golden oranges of Spain, the daughters of the sun!” on a promo disc intermediated by David Noades. The campaign was, according to this auction site, actually late 1960s and featured some revolting children and serving suggestions on the inside cover and some rather alarming dwarves on the outside: … but here anyway is…
A friend looking for a childbirth course in one of Spain’s lonelier regions said that ghitting parto and the name of the county capital only ghot veterinary sites. I tried to replicate, and discovered that the municipal authorities can’t spell the name of their principal natural attraction, the Cantabrian brown bear, or oso parto pardo…
“Spanish climatological records reveal that in the Cold Triangle [ie Teruel, Molina de Aragón and Calamocha] there have been numerous episodes … with temperatures below -25ºC at less than 200km from the mild Mediterranean as the crow flies. [This is one demonstration of the fact] that Spain has climates, not a climate.” (Aupí, Guía del…
Literally: When at Seville in 1809, Lord Byron lodged in the house of two unmarried ladies; and in his diary he describes himself as having made earnest love to the younger of them, with the help of a dictionary. “For some time,” he says, ” I went on prosperously, both as a linguist and a…
More poorly translated save-the-planet spam: Ingles:Darkness world: On September 17, 2008 from 21:50 to 22:00 hours.Proposes to delete all lights and if possible all electrical appliances, to our planet can ‘breathe’.if the answer is massive, energy saving can be brutal.Only 10 minutes, and see what happens.Yes, we are 10 minutes in the dark, we light…
The organisation that pimped Aznar to Deloitte can’t afford a translator: There is only one person capable of combining intellectual stature, communication abilities, and bullfighting mastership: Luis Francisco Esplá. Highly recommended for international meetings and foreign notorious visits, he is the sole bullfighter able to make the audience vibrate in a convention or congress. As…
Bodegas Almocaden goes beyond the usual annoying Flash and cursor-stalker. All a bit sad: I’ve never drunk anything by them, but I suspect it’s pretty good. Unfortunately there’s more to life than product.
With the vaguest of references to i-shepan-im here’s Kirby’s wonderful and scientific museum in 1820: The fecundity of the rabbit is truly astonishing ; it breeds seven times in the year, and generally produces eight young at a time ; from which it is calculated, that one pair may increase in the course of four…