Month: Aug 2021

Posted in Portuguese

Um Escritor Islandês

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Today’s text is about Halldór Laxness, who was discussed on the Backlisted podcast. I got two corrections and I’ve put some notes at the bottom, some of which have some pretty interesting nuances of the language in them.

Halldór Laxness, public domain image from Wikipedia
Halldór Laxness

A minha esposa uma vez leu um livro de Halldór Laxness, um escritor islandês. É quase desconhecido em Inglaterra mas ganhou o Prémio Nobel de Literatura há décadas.
Ora bem, estava eu* a escutar o meu Podcast que já mencionei num outro texto quando um dos apresentadores falou de uma visita que tinha realizado** à Islândia. Numa excursão*** , um guia turístico indicou uma casa e afirmou “Aquela é a casa do nosso vencedor do Prémio Nobel, Halldór Laxness. Será que há alguém que conheça esse nome?”
O apresentador respondeu “Conheço. Já li um livro dele”
“A sério?” admirou o guia. “O senhor é o primeiro turista que ouviu falar dele, muito menos que leu um livro dele!”
“Oh”, exclamou ele. “Fico com tão orgulhoso!”
“Não”, replicou a guia. “Eu é que fico orgulhoso”.

Gosto muito**** desta história porque mostra bem o orgulho que os leitores de qualquer país sentem pelos melhores autores nacionais. Portugal tem Saramago (mais um laureado!) , Pessoa e Camões, nós temos Shakespeare, Dickens e Pam Ayres*****, e os islandeses têm o seu próprio Laxness.

*I originally wrote “eu estava” but that comes across as too colloquial and reversing the order comes across as better. It’s hard to relate this to anything in English so it might just be one of those things you need to get used to.

**Realizar has a meaning that just about exists in English but isn’t really used very often: it’s to make something real. You’ll occasionally hear about someone “realising improvements in…” productivity of fitness or whatever it might be, but that’s unusual. We tend to use realise to mean something like “perceive” or “understand”, and I think the Portuguese meaning probably makes more sense.

***Originally “Enquanto lá estava” (while he was there a tour guide pointed…) but the corrector pointed out this comes across as a clash, because “enquanto lá estava” indicates an extended period of time but the pointing only happened once. I think you could get away with it in English so part of me feels this might be a tiny bit “picuinhas” but maybe it sounds worse to Portuguese ears so it’s probably worth avoiding this kind of construction.

**** I originally wrote “tanto” on place of muito, but “I like this story so much because…” doesn’t really fly I’m Portuguese. I should have known. Its a relatively modern way of speaking in English. I don’t think we’d have said that in the eighties, say, it seems like something that we’ve picked up from watching American TV more recently.

*****Writers of equal stature. I will die on this hill.

Posted in English

The Corrections

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Writing texts in the WritestreakPT subreddit has been really interesting. That’s where all these corrections have been coming from on this blog lately, and the people who hang out there correcting texts are really nice. It’s good when the corrections show you new words and are an education in themselves, and today has produced some.really interesting new words so I thought I’d share the results of my digging. These are all taken from the comments under “Os Adolescentes”

“Não vou ser assim tão picuinhas aqui”. I’m not going to be so fussy here. Picuinhas is an odd looking word. It almost looks like it wants a q in place of the c. And more to the point, why is it an adjective that apparently always ends in -as, even when the noun it’s referring to is singular and masculine? Priberam defines it as “Quem é exageradamente minucioso, quem dá muito importância a pormenores”. So I almost translated it as pedantic, but “pedante” already exists and I think fussy or picky is probably nearer the mark.

“Alguns são matreiros” Some of them are tricky.

“O meu pelouro são as vírgulas”. My area of responsibility is commas. I assumed “pelouro” must be like “pet peeve” but it’s not. A Pelouro is a branch of the municipal government of the responsibility of an individual Councillor, so by extension if someone says “O meu pelouro é (whatever)” they’re saying that’s their department: the thing they care about, and they make it their business to keep an eye on it.

I’m not sure what a pet peeve is. “Pet hate”, if you’re interested, is “Ódio de estimação”, which is exactly what you’d expect since a pet is an animal de estimação.

I asked about the Pelouro example. It is, as she said, “um pouco rebuscado” that they use local council departments as a way of denoting personal areas of responsibility. I only know “rebuscado” as meaning “far-fetched” when describing a book, say, but it has other meanings and the sense seems to be slightly different here. It’s a bit of a stretch; it’s a bit laboured.

I was advised to maybe check up on a facebook group called “Tesourinhos das Autárquicas” (clippings from the local elections) to get a flavour of what goes on in Portuguese local democracy. It’s a good way of getting some exposure to the language, culture and politics of the country, which can only be a good thing.

Finally, I said (in English) “I can feel a blog post coming on”, and that, apparently is “Cheira-me que vem aí uma publicação do blog”. It smells like there is a blog post coming. Smells? What are you implying? 🤔

Posted in Portuguese

Os Adolescentes

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Today’s text is about teenagers and their sleep patterns. Dani Morgenstern helped me with the corrections and there are a few footnotes at the bottom.

Alguém me disse* que os adolescentes precisam de dormir até ao meio-dia porque os cérebros deles estão a desenvolver-se ou algo do género. Sou cético quanto a tais afirmações. Na minha opinião, todas as pessoas** são únicas e os seus hábitos e comportamentos surgem por motivos mais complexos. Por exemplo, quando era jovem, queria ficar acordado depois da hora da hora de dormir dos meus pais para estabelecer a minha própria independência, tipo vida noturna. E identifico algo de semelhante*** na minha filha que tem dezasseis anos. A tendência pode ser ainda mais forte hoje em dia porque temos de ficar em casa a maior parte do tempo, portanto ela tem menos liberdade. Ainda por cima, existem tantos aparelhos e dispositivos. Tenho toda a certeza de que se existissem o Netflix e as redes sociais quando eu era adolescente, eu nunca teria dormido antes das seis**** da manhã!

Estou aqui na sala de estar, a pensar nisto enquanto a minha filha dorme.

* Alguém is attractive so the pronoun goes before the verb.

** i wrote “pessoas em geral” as a literal translation of “people in general” but that’s not very idiomatic.

*** algo de semelhante – it needs the de, you can’t just say “something similar”, it has to be “something of similar”

**** quick reminder that although I usually write all numbers out in full for practice – like the Dezasseis in this passage, the correct form is to write any number higher than 12 as a number, so if you’re doing anything where it matters, such as an exam, make sure you remember that.