I’m really surprised not to have come across this word before, given that I buy a lot of books. Brochado means the book is in a soft cover – paperback or thin card – bound by sewing them to the spine, not by gluing them in place. Nice, specific word.
There’d nothing new under the sun.
I was reading this graphic novel, Vampiros, about a group of soldiers in Guiné during the war, and the saying seemed not to make sense. Amparo looks like it ought to be an adjective, but then why doesn’t it agree with Farinha?
I looked it up and amparo doesn’t have an adjective definition, so I tried the whole phrase and it finally hit me, I’d seen this before: it was used in A Crónica Dos Bons Malandros and I’ve written about it, so I should have known it.
It’s an old advertising slogan, and the idea is if you’ve got good, pure ingredients then you’ll get a reliably good products. In other words, don’t worry, we’re well prepared and everything will go smoothly.
Sigh. I really wish I remembered more of what I’ve written in here. My memory has always been pretty terrible and it’s not getting any better with age.
I can’t really think of any other idiomatic expressions in portuguese that come from adverts. I’m pretty sure I can think of a few in English that we used to use during the TV Age, but they didn’t tend to last very long, so I’m not sure if this one is current. Mario Zambujalvs novel, is set in the 80s, and the comic I’m reading now is older but it’s set in the early seventies.
Struggling a bit with Os Cus de Judas. I should have finished it by now really, but it’s non-linear, dense, grammatically complicated and has very long sentences full of very fancy, unfamiliar words. On top of that, the cultural references fly right over my head, obviously, since he’s writing about a time when I was about 4 years old.
I’ve taken to reading it on a tablet which is easier since I can use the onboard dictionary and save a lot of tedious page flipping business. I can even have it read to me in a passable robot voice, which helps me sustain the momentum.
Of course not all the words are in its dictionary. Vitaphor isn’t capitalised but I believe it’s a kind of medicinal tonic drink… Maybe…
Following on from the last post about not noticing romance language roots in English, I came across another example. I was reading “Everything Is Predictable” by Tom Chivers, which is about Bayesian Statistics. In the chapter I’ve just read he talks about the difference between ways of not knowing something. Take these two examples:
Firstly, you have a coin and you toss it in the air but it hasn’t landed yet.
Secondly, your friend has tossed a coin, caught it but hasn’t yet told you the result.
I’m the first situation, your uncertainty comes from the fact that it’s really impossible to know how the coin will land. Whereas in the second case, the coin has landed so there is a real, knowable answer, you just don’t know it yet.
The first is called Aleatoric Uncertainty and the second Epistemological Uncertainty.
OK, well if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to read the book. I’m only mentioning it here because Aleatoric is a word we never really use outside of these specialised contexts. In fact, I’m pretty sure if never heard it before in my 56 years of speaking English, but in Portuguese of course aleatório is just the word for “random” and it’s pretty common.
Of course it come back to latin. As you will remember from your roman history (OK, OK, i admit, I only know it from Astérix books) Alea Jacta Est means “The die is cast” so Aleatório gives an idea of having thrown the dice and awaiting the results.
This aspect of portuguese is seldom part of standard lessons. Maybe it should be?
Welcome back to the Capitão Fausto Fan Blog! It’s still Friday night as I write this, and the translation I did for yesterday’s blog was so short I thought I’d try another
| Português | Inglês |
|---|---|
| Quando aqui chegou Foi porque ainda não estava Nada se apagou enquanto eu protestava E às tantas sossegou Explicaram que afinal não era nada | When she* got here It was because she wasn’t here yet Nothing stopped while I was protesting And at last it calmed down They explained that in the end it was nothing |
| Andar em contramão Calçar a botifarra Quero ouvir calão e o som de uma guitarra Se dás, eu também dou Se gritas muito, eu dou-te uma dentada | Going against the flow Putting on my clumpy boots I want to hear slang and the sound of a guitar If you give I’ll give too If you scream, I’ll bite you |
| Cheguei a casa e sossegou Explicaram que afinal não era na-na-na-na nada Na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na | I got home and chilled out They explained that in the end it was no-no-no-no-nothing, no-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing |
| Quem me der a mão é porque quer que eu nunca caia Pode ser que queira vir comigo até à praia Ou pode ser que não, de qualquer forma vai ter de entender Que ainda há muita coisa pra aprender Algumas delas servirão Mas outras nunca vão servir pra na-na-na-na nada | Whoever gives me their hand, its because they don’t want me to ever fall Maybe they want to come to the beach with me Or maybe not. Somehow she’ll have to understand That there’s still a lot to learn Some of them will be OK But others are good for nothing |
| Na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na Na-na-na-na nada, na-na-na-na-na-na | No-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing No-no-no-no-nothing no-no-no-no-nothing |
*Honestly, it’s anybody’s guess what pronouns to use in most of this song. Who or what is he on about? Are those imperfect verbs in the first or third person? Can we even get an adjective with an ending that tells us what gender we’re dealing with? Throw me a frickin’ bone here!
OK, I think I’m sick of them again now,
Well, I can’t see my new pro-Fausto stance lasting long because, as I said yesterday, their studio output is quite bland and overproduced, but while I am in the zone, let’s try a translation. This is Santa Ana from their first album, Gazela, and one of the songs they played as the finale for the show.
| Português | Inglês |
|---|---|
| Está a chover dentro da sala de estar A casa ardeu; ninguém parou de dançar | It’s raining in the living room The house caught fire. Nobody stopped dancing |
| Ela diz que devo aprender As noites simples e o que é ficar Ela é linda e o seu parecer Faz-me sentir que é tempo de mudar | She says I should learn The ordinary nights are what it is to stay She’s lovely and her appearance Makes me think it’s time to change |
| Está a chover dentro da sala de estar A casa ardeu; ninguém parou de dançar | It’s raining in the living room The house caught fire. Nobody stopped dancing |
| Ela diz que eu devo aprender As noites simples e o que é ficar Ela é linda mas não quer ver Que qualquer dia já cá não vou estar | She says I should learn The ordinary nights are what it is to stay She’s lovely but I don’t want to see That someday I won’t be here |
Is that all? 8 lines? I don’t feel like I’ve had much of a workout. That’s a long instrumental break they did at the end there. OK, well, I like the lyrics anyway, even if they are a bit terse, sometimes it’s best to keep it tight and not waffle on for 4 verses. I hope you enjoyed it.
Got the result for the second of the exams. It arrived via a completely different route from the other, contributing to my impression that the Universidade Aberta’s systems are a bit more random than the Open University in Britain. Anyway, never mind. As for my own performance, well, it was pretty terrible. Worse than expected, even. 7/12, which is only just over the pass mark. Luckily, this one has 40% for continual evaluation though, and I did pretty well in that so the average was dragged up. 13.7/20 which is what? 65 +3.5 = 68.5%. That’s not bad really! If I’d had 5 more minutes for a quick grammar check Iºd have probably gone up 5 or 10%, I think, but it was not to be!
The final stage of the course is starting now: Literatura e Cultura Portuguesas – Época Contemporânea. It seems to be all about the colonial wars and the end of empire and there are three set books, two of which I have read already and one is on my TBR: respectively “O Retorno” (Dulce Maria Cardoso), “A Costa dos Murmúrios” (Lídia Jorge) and “Os Cus de Judas” (António Lobo Antunes). I’m excited to get started because I enjoyed the first two books but don’t remember them well, so a guided re-read of them would be great, and Os Cus de Judas comes highly recommended too!
And it’s not exactly easy to find. Nobody told me I had passed or anything but according to the site I got “18.00”. OK, well fine but out of what? Not 18% I hope!
I had to go back to the course description in the end and it says that…
O Exame Final consiste numa única prova escrita, realizada na plataforma WISEFlow e classificada numa escala de 0 (zero) a 20 (vinte) valores.
So… I think I got 90%! Pretty pleased with that! The pass mark is only 50, and 90% is way beyond what I’ve got in any exam since O-Levels, so yeah, pretty pleased!
I’ve just finished the literature exam. I think I gave pretty solid answers, but I was much more pressed for time in this one than the last and crucially didn’t have time to go back and fix typos. And the browser they use for the exams doesn’t even have spellcheck or any of the other features I take for granted when writing here, say, so I imagine I will be losing some marks for my shit grammar.
Chewing over other things I probably could have done better, I discussed a narrative told to the narrator by a character she interviews and I probably should have slipped the word “intradiegético” in there somewhere. Likewise, when discussing other forms of art used as framing devices in Os Memoráveis (the fact that they are making a film, and the fact that they have a photograph with them which they are using the jog people’s memories) I think I explained the mechanism pretty well but I should have used the word “intermediality”. Just throwing away points, there.
Half way through, a parakeet came and landed on the bird feeder near where I’m sitting. It’s really only for little birds like robins and tits, so if I see a parakeet, a crow or a pigeon out there I usually chuck a pen, or whatever is to hand, at the window to scare them away. This time I only had my wallet so I threw that, realising, just as it left my hand, that the window was open in the direction i was throwing. Luckily, I hit the glass and disaster was averted. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to come on here and say “Well, I was failed for leaving the table for 3 minutes while I ran downstairs to retrieve my credit cards from the pavement after lobbing them at a ring-necked parakeet”!
Luso 