Today’s text is pretty short and maybe a tiny bit sentimental. Corrections by Dani Morgenstern. Thanks.
Ontem, vasculhei as* minhas pastas à procura de vídeos e fotografias duplicados. Encontrei montes deles, apaguei-os e acabei por libertar muito espaço no disco.
Mas durante o processo, deparei-me com muitos vídeos da minha filha. Esqueci-me de tantos momentos preciosos na vida dela, mas a câmara nunca se esquece.
*=Vasculhar is like “rummage” but unlike rummage it doesn’t need “in” after it as I originally wrote. I just rummaged my folders!
Today’s written work is abiut the accent in the Azores. Thanks for the corrections teafvigoli
Ai, que obra desafiadora. Apesar de ter tentado muitas vezes, não é nada fácil entender o sotaque açoriano. Ouvi dizer que o sotaque madeirense é difícil também. A minha esposa sempre fica frustrada por causa dos funcionários do consulado que fingem não entender as suas palavras mas na minha orelha não é assim to diferente dos sotaques continentais.
Por outro lado este sotaque no vídeo é quase incompreensível. Sem as legendas eu não seria capaz de entender patavina. Mal acreditaria que seja sequer português. Soa francês.
Practice text, with corrections from teafvigoli (thank you!). I’ve added some notes at the bottom.
Há uns dias, eu e a minha esposa ficámos com sintomas dum resfriado: narizes constipados, espirros, tosses , cansaço. Não nos preocupamos assim tanto porque havia muito pólen e muito calor e achávamos que era algum tipo de febre de feno, combinado com falta de sono.
Mas a minha esposa recebeu uma notificação do NHS (sistema de saúde nacional inglês) que disse que ela tinha entrado em contacto com alguém com o covid 19 4 dias antes. Pediu um teste PCR. Dois dias depois, sabemos com certeza que ela estava com o vírus. A família inteira está vacinada (embora a filha ainda tenha um dose só) portanto o nosso risco é muito reduzido mas ainda assim, levamos a doença a sério.
Eu pensei, ah, se assim é, os meus sintomas* devem ser por causa do mesmo vírus. Pedimos mais dois testes (um para mim e um para a macaquinha), fizemo-los**, mas os resultados voltaram negativos. Para mim, isso não bate certo. Se eu não tivesse o vírus, a única explicação seria que eu apanhei um resfriado no mesmo dia que ela apanhou o covid e nós dois viviamos juntos no mesmo apartamento sem transferir os nossos vírus*** um ao outro, nem à nossa filha. Parece-me mais provável que tenha estragado o teste de qualquer maneira. Mas não tenho certeza.
Em ambos os casos, preciso de ficar em casa mas acho que preciso de agir como se tivesse o vírus porque é mais seguro assim.
* Sintoma (symptom) is one of those nouns ending in -a that come from Greek and take masculine pronouns.
** Fazer testes, not just for school tests but even when when it’s a test kit like this – you do it, you don’t use it.
*** vírus has no plural. Not viruses, not viri.
A useful idiomatic phrase here is “mais vale prevenir que remediar” (prevention is worth more than cure) as I was reminded in the comments!
I made these yesterday and tried translating them into Portuguese… Seems straightforward enough but humour is a bit tricky to get right.
… Obviously I realise the first one seems a bit douchey out of context, but the idea is to contrast vaccinated people with conspiracists, not to pretend Covid is no longer a problem. There are plenty of ways you can overthink it, but in the original context I think they made sense, so just try and relax and bask in the memishness.
Words for pandemic deniers can include negadores (“deniers”) negacionistas (“denialists” i guess) and I believe a conspiracy theorist is “o teórico da conspiração”
Ive used “disparates” for “nonsense”. I think “tretas” might have worked too. I feel that’s more like a deliberate, strategic falsehood rather than just straightforward nonsense. There are probably other options: maybe “bitates” (which I think is like waffle) or “palpites” (guesswork), or just the all-out rudity like merda. I’m sure there are dozens more. There certainly are in English!
Have I mentioned we had an outbreak of covid in the house? I don’t think I have on this blog. It’s all a bit mysterious really. I’ve written a text about it in Portuguese though so that will be popping up later today.
Another practice text. Thanks to danimorgenstern for the help.
Tenho um agendamento para falar através do Skype com um especialista em recrutamento que me vai ajudar rescrever o meu CV. Demorei muito a contactar este homem porque sempre pensei “É a minha vida. Quem sabe melhor do que eu como resumir a minha própria carreira?”
Mas infelizmente não é assim tão simples. Escrever um CV é um bicho-de-sete-cabeças. É preciso ter confiança sem ser arrogante. Temos de incluir todos os nossos cargos recentes, as nossas competências e as nossas formações. Os recrutadores costumam usar uma aplicação informática que analisa o CV do candidato. Portanto não é suficiente escrever uma história; a história deve conter palavras específicas para assinalar a nossa adequação. Se não o nosso CV acabará por ser arquivado no arquivo redondo sob a mesa*.
*=O arquivo redondo sob a mesa (“the round filing cabinet under the table”) is a phrase I used jokingly, translating from English but apparently the wastepaper basket is sometimes called “O arquivo vertical” because of the way papers land one on top of another.
Thanks danimorgenstern and teafvigoli for the corrections. They double-teamed me but it wasn’t too bad. Only 3 mistakes between them!
Prom-Etheus, about to steal fire (and electricity and water and falling stage settings) from the gods.
A minha filha está na festa do fim da escolaridade. Hoje em dia a festa chama-se o “Prom” como a festa da mesma época na vida dum adolescente americano. Não faço ideia porquê*. Vestiu um vestido roxo com saltos altos. Parece tão crescida mas também permanece a minha menina. Foi com a sua amiga depois de beber um Pimms com morangos e pepino. É um rito de passagem. Sinto-me com saudades da bebé mas também estou cheio de orgulho por causa da confiança e a beleza da mulherzinha que a substituiu.
*=Seriously though, fam, why are we calling it Prom now? Has there ever been a good, trouble-free prom experience in any American movie you’ve ever seen?
Today’s daily text is about a book podcast in English. Thanks to danimorgenstern for the corrections
Há algum tempo ouvia dois podcasts sobre livros: Bookshambles e Mostly Lit mas o segundo acabou quando um dos três apresentadores saiu para escrever os seus próprios livros. Depois, o primeiro deixou de falar sobre livros e fiquei aborrecido. Mas ontem ouvi falar dum podcast interessante chamado Backlisted. Não é novo, apenas não tinha reparado nele antes. O seu arquivo tem montes de gravações sobre livros antigos que eu adoro tal como “A Month In the Country” de JL Carr e “The Dark is Rising” de Susan Cooper. Os apresentadores adoram livros e sabem tanto mas mesmo tanto sobre os autores dos quais falam. Estou a gostar muito! Não conheço nenhuns podcasts portugueses semelhantes mas não me importa assim tanto porque existem Booktubers amadores que deixam opiniões sobre os seus livros preferidos e é aí que mato a minha sede livrólica!*
*=i originally tried to write this last sentence by splicing together two lines from two of the poems I’ve been learning by heart: “nele é que espelho o céu” (from Mar Português by Fernando Pessoa) and “Com luar matar a sede ao gado” (from Rústica by Florbela Espanca). It ended up as “nele é que mato a minha sede livrólica!” but I’d obviously bitten off more than I could chew!
I see the Portuguese papers are covering Dom Cummings’s interview with Laura Kuennsberg. Now, I don’t really think Cummings and his ridiculous scheming need any more free publicity so for the purposes of this blog post, I will change his face and name to that of another Dom, namely Dom Casmurro, the protagonist of a classic Brazilian novel of the same name by Machado de Assis*. Why would Dom Casmurro want to bring about Brexit? Something to do with his belief in the power of unfettered free markets, I think. Yes, that’s right… He’s a Capitulist**.
One of the things Dom Casmurro said in his interview was that anyone who was sure about the outcomes of brexit must have “a screw loose”. Except the Portuguese headline doesn’t actually say that, it says one screw short: “Um parafuso a menos”. I wondered if this was just an attempt at a literal translation of an English expression that had gone a bit wrong, but it isn’t. According to priberam, the expression “ter um parafuso a menos” actually exists as an idiomatic expression and it means the same thing as “have a screw loose” means in English.
There are variations. You can hear it as “um parafuso de menos” because a menos and de menos mean the same thing. And here’s where the plot thickens: you can also have “um parafuso a mais” – one screw too many!
I suppose the fact that Portuguese screws can be too many or too few might point to a subtle difference in what Portuguese and English speakers are imagining when they use their version of the expression. It seems as if the Portuguese version relates to something like an IKEA assembly, or some sort of building project where you either run out of screws or have one left over at the end. Something must have gone wrong in the assembly. In English, on the other hand, we’re usually thinking of a machine that is behaving erratically, rattling and producing defective work because it hasn’t had all its fixtures tightened properly.
I like this sort of divergence. There are lots of examples of Portuguese expressions that are identical to English ones and plenty where an expression only exists in one language. But this sort of case is intriguing because they’re similar but with a different slant in Portuguese vs English. How did they end up like this? I refuse to believe that they just emerged independently. That just doesn’t ring true at all.
So… Maybe the expression started out in one language and was transmitted to the other but in the process it got altered slightly? So if it started in English and got adopted in Portuguese, “um parafuso a menos” sounded better than “um parafuso à solta”.
Or vice versa, if it traveled to London from Lisbon, “a screw loose” sounded better than “a screw missing” to anglophone ears so we changed it to suit ourselves.
Alternatively, maybe it was imported into both languages from a third, such as French, say. I had a half-hearted look online for “un vis desserrée” or various ways I could think of saying absent, missing, failed screws with my rusty O-Level French, but couldn’t come up with anything that brought back a high enough number of Google results to convince me I was looking at a common ancestor of my English and Portuguese expressions.
Dictionaries, whether English or Portuguese, limit themselves to etymologies within English and Portuguese and don’t acknowledge earlier instances in other languages, so there’s not much of a clue to be had there. English dictionaries claim origins somewhere around the 18th or 19th centuries but I don’t see any dates in any online Portuguese dictionaries. Maybe it’s time to invest in a chunky breeze-block sized Portuguese dictionary at last.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I don’t know for sure but I am pretty sure that there has been some cross-pollination of languages here, but not a direct, literal translation. If anyone reading this has any more information I’d love to hear about it. In the meantime, the expression “um parafuso a menos” seems useful to know and I will definitely try and work it into the conversation next time I meet a young poet on a train who wants me to listen to his poetry when I am feeling sleepy.
*=The Dom in Dom Casmurro isn’t a name though, it’s an honorific like “Sir” or “Lord”. The protagonist, Bento Santiago is given the name Don Casmurro on the very first page of the book by an annoying wannabe poet who he has met on a train journey. Casmurro doesn’t translate well into English but it’s something along the lines of stubborn, monomaniacal, a loner… Pig-headed maybe? “Lord Pig-headed”? I dunno. It’s not a catchy name for a book is it?
**= in the book, Bento falls in love with and marries his neighbour Capitolina, known as Capitu. The novel is really popular but there’s a raging controversy among its admirers which hinges on whether or not Bento is correct in his belief that she has been unfaithful to him. IMHO, no, he’s an idiot, but that’s far from a universally held opinion! Anyway, sorry, that’s a lot of background material to explain a pretty terrible pun, isn’t it?
Another practice text. Thanks to redditor ansanttos for helping correct my mistakes
A minha filha e a minha esposa visitaram o IKEA hoje. Queriam comprar umas cortinas mas voltaram com 1 300 251 bolachas, 8 formas* de gelado, uma escovilhão de loiça, um candeeiro e várias flores e decorações inesperadas. Juro que aqueles suecos põem drogas nas almôndegas para hipnotisar os clientes e fazê-los comprar coisas de que não precisam.
*=ice cream moulds. I originally said “moldagens” here. I get so confused even over the English word give that there are jelly moulds and moulds that grow on old food and I always have to pause and think is mold is the right spelling for either? It’s not, it’s the American spelling of both but in UK English we don’t use mold at all. Anyway, forma is apparently the right word in Portuguese. but molde is also OK. Not moldagem (which is the act of moulding something) or moldura (a picture frame). And certainly not moulde. I’d like to blame the Americans for that last one but I can’t make the charge stick.
Since “The New Normal” has been a theme today, here’s Sergio Godinho with a song of that name, written in August last year and containing obvious references to the long nightmare from which we hope we will soon awake (although I’m writing this the day after “Freedom Day” and I am regning in my optimism…)
Dadas as circunstâncias Given the circumstances Mantenha as distâncias Keep your distance Respeite os espaços Respect the spaces Controle essas ânsias Control your urges De beijos e abraços for kisses and hugs Refreie as audácias e as inobservâncias Refrain from risks and non-observances
Luso 