This guy asked if José Milhazes (he’s the guy in this video and the author of this book) was just a “Todólogo”. I couldn’t find it anywhere but as it turns out, that’s because he’d misspelled it. It should be tudólogo with a U. The suffix “-ólogo” is the equivalent of “-ologist”. And a tudo-ólogo is an everythingolohist. A know-it-all in other words. Someone who acts like an expert on everything but doesn’t really know anything.
I tried to make a joke in a discussion about a previous post and it didn’t work so here’s a very laboured discussion of when and whether “In Soviet Russia” jokes can work in portuguese. It was always going to be a challenging text and, sure enough, I made lots of errors. For me, the tricky part if how to emphasise the reversal at the end. I want it to land hard on the “you” at the end. I’m sure I’ve seen this done in portuguese by doubling up in the pronoun – like “Parece-me a mim…” but I don’t think I really stuck the landing on any of these attempts.
Este texto é uma tentativa de recriar uma piada antiga. Tentei copiar o formato duma resposta a um comentário da Dani, mas acho que não funciona.
Em inglês, o modelo é assim (imaginem que o falante é um russo num programa americano). “Here in America, is very good, everyone watch television. In old country, television watch you!”(1)
Muitos destas piadas não funcionam se forem traduzidas literalmente: “Nos Estados Unidos podes sempre encontrar uma festa. Na Rússia, o partido encontra-te sempre a ti” é engraçado em inglês porque “festa” e “partido” traduzem-se ambos* como “party”, mas em português, nem por isso.
O mais difícil, acho eu, é como enfatizar a inversão dos pronomes. Acho que preciso de usar a forma Verbo hífen pronome indireto [a] pronome subjetivo. Vamos experimentar alguns…
“Nos Estados Unidos, toda a gente vê televisão. Na Rússia** Soviética a televisão vê-te a ti”
Ou talvez “…vê-nos a nós”
No Reino Unido, comem-se nabos. Na Rússia, os nabos comem-te comem-vos a você
Ou talvez “…tu comes nabos…” ***
Hum… A forma “você” parece demasiado formal para uma piada…?
Em Portugal não se tem bico-de-obra, bico-de-obra tem-te a ti****.
Em português, conjugam-se os verbos. Na Rússia soviética, os verbos conjugam-te a ti.
O que acham? O Bruno Nogueira anda preocupado que eu roubo-lhe o emprego?
(1) A conjugação do verbo em inglês está errada, mas vou ignorar. Se as minhas flexões todas estão erradas, não é deliberado, é um lapso.
* Ambos (“both”) goes after the verb, unlike in English.
**The corrector suggested changing this to ‘na União Sovietica’ which is technically right, but I think the joke format tends to be “In Soviet Russia”, not “In the Soviet Union”
*** Although você is formal, it can be used in jokes if the formality is relevant to the situation. It would have been better in the tu form though.
**** This was the original joke I tried to make, leading to my deciding to write this post. When I first tried it, in the reddit comments under a previous text, it looked like this:
OK definitely in a learning slump. No energy to do anything. No energy to post here, listen to anything, even read my book. I’m just a big monolingual potato at the moment. I need to snap out of it.
Will I ever be good enough at listening to understand this sort of thing without the subtitles. Even with the subtitles it’s bad enough.
I saw a bad translation in a vocabulary app: embater =to hit. Well, why is it not just bater? Bater seems to be one of those words that has been used as a rooot to make other verbs, and embater can mean hit if you want to say something like “The car hit a tree”, but it’s more like a collision than a punch. The way it works is…
Bater = To Strike, Beat, Hit. The vanilla version. How you translate it depends on the pronoun, to a certain extent.
Embater = Collide, crash
Abater = Slaughter, cull
Combater = Combat, counteract
There’s also esbater (to blur) and debater (to debate) but I don’t think those are part of the same family since they aren’t as violent.
I seem to write a lot about Bater. I wrote a whole post on it a while ago and… Have I posted this meme already? I feel like I must have. It’s pretty old and there are loads of copies so I don’t know who to attribute it to.
I’ve been noticing in the last few days I keep getting “likes” in old posts, and always the most boring, obscure homeworky ones too, not the fun ones. Of course I should have guessed, they’re all the ones with “exercise” in the name and some people are using bots to publicise their health-related blogs by dropping random likes on any post with a relevant keyword in the name. The Internet is a pointless place sometimes.
Discussing yesterday’s post with a friend, she pointed me to a sketch from a satirical show called Gato Fedorento (literally “Stinky Cat”) from 2007 which had a similar phrase in it. It’s actually not the same as the usage I’d heard, but it lives on as a meme, so I am definitely interested, and I spent some time understanding it anyway! The phrase is “É proibido mas pode-se fazer”.
The background is that in that year there was a referendum about reforming the abortion laws, which was quite a big deal in a largely catholic country. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had initially supported a referendum in 1997 but when it had finally come to the crunch ten years later he campaigned against it and set up a website critical of the plan called “Assim Não” (“Not like this”). Cynical political move or principled stand? Well, if I understand it, his reasoning was that in the ten years that had elapsed, he was out of power the Partido Socialista had launched the referendum, backed by a law they had written. The wording on the referendum remained “despenalização” (decriminalisation) but the law they were intending to pass was actually advocating “liberalização” (liberalisation), which he argued was slightly different. On top of that, there was an indication that women would be able to have abortions by their own choice, with no need to justify it on psychological, medical or other grounds, which he did not support. And he even goes on to paint a picture of a world where women are choosing abortions more-or-less at a whim. He is pretty ridiculous about it, actually. The bottom line was that he didn’t want to liberalise the conditions under which women could get abortions, he just wanted to take away the criminal penalty.
Here’s the original video.
(By the way, what’s the camera guy playing at? There are some really odd zoom shots and then, at about 2:00, he starts filming the guy through a glass on the table. That’s a pretty cool shot if you’re making an edgy police drama, but it’s weird AF in this context)
Anyway Gato Fedorento mocked him by having Ricardo Araújo Pereira repeat his speech (without the avant garde camera work) but spelling out the absurdity of how he wants it to work: “É proibido, mas pode-se fazer”. Or “It’s illegal but you can do it”.
Marcelo is the president now. Make of that what you will.
Luso 