Here’s a corrected text from a couple of days ago with some additional notes. The theme is this weird new Mad-Libs policy about refugees that the British government came up with just before Easter and then were shocked… shocked! – when every vicar in the land used their easter sermons to say it wasn’t what Jesus would have done.
Pensei em escrever sobre a nova política do partido conservador face à imigração de refugiados mas é tão ridículo que, contado, ninguém acredita. A questão da imigração e dos refugiados (não são iguais mas são semelhantes até certo ponto) é complicado e cada país tem de pensar bem antes de fazer uma política que passa a prova de justiça e de compaixão, mas o nosso governo não se importa.
Amazingly this text didn’t need any corrections (it’s not often that happens!) but Dani told me more about the phrase “Contado Ninguém Acredita”. I only know it from the Deolinda song
… But it’s also the Portuguese translation of the name of the American movie “Stranger than Fiction”.
It’s usually said as part of a larger expression “Isto só visto porque contado ninguém acredita” which basically means “You have to see it to believe it. There used to be a TV series in the nineties called Isto Só Vídeo which was a sort of Portuguese equivalent of those cheap shows where people send in their home videos of terrible disasters – falling off bikes or getting whacked in the face by a swing or whatever – and you wonder how long they had to spend on A&E to bring the nation 30 seconds of amusement. I’m thinking of Jeremy Beadle because my cultural references are very out of date but I’m pretty sure they are still a thing now and of course YouTube is full of them. Anyway here’s what it looks like.
How’s that? I’ve gone from the refugee crisis to Jeremy Beadle in 5 paragraphs. Not bad eh?
Launching an occasional series tentatively entitled Ambassador Update. This week: there is a new Portuguese ambassador in London, and the British ambassador in Lisbon fell of his bike and tweeted (in Portuguese, natch) about how well he was treated by everyone involved. Thanks to Dani Morgenstern for the help. I wrote this a while ago and delayed till I had the corrections for it, so maybe by the time you read this the world will have moved on but I’m betting you are not the sort of person who needs their ambassador news to be bang up to the minute so I hope you’ll bear with me.
Aqui em Londres, há um novo embaixador português. Sua excelência Manuel Lobo Antunes aposentou-se e voltou para Portugal. No seu lugar, Nuno Brito apresentou as suas credenciais a Sua majestade na quinta feira da semana passada.
Entretanto no parque de Monsanto, nos arredores de Lisboa, no sábado da mesma semana, o seu homólogo, Chris Sainty, o embaixador do Reino Unido, caiu da sua bicicleta e partiu um ombro. Escreveu um tweet no qual elogiou a gentileza dos transeuntes que vieram em* sua ajuda, e o profissionalismo dos médicos e enfermeiros que cuidaram dele no Hospital São Francisco Xavier.
Hoje caí da bicicleta no Parque de Monsanto. Muitas pessoas gentis pararam para me ajudar. Uma delas telefonou para os serviços de emergência e outra ficou comigo à beira da estrada até a ambulância chegar. Fui levado para o Hospital São Francisco Xavier. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/rHZuTFZGJI
Wow, well, this was going to just be another Portuguese text with footnotes but one of the footnotes sent me off down such a rabbit-hole about the origins of this song that I’ve ended up writing a whole separate blog post in English grafted onto the bottom and frankly it’s a lot more interesting than the Portuguese text. Thanks to Patis12 for help with the Portuguese parts.
Já falei do filme que eu e a minha filha vimos há uns dias – Opération Portugal. Há uma cena perto do final no qual os portugueses lutam contra os criminosos. Batem-lhes na cara com as suas pás – pumba! A banda sonora da cena é uma música famosa dos xutos e pontapés, chamada “A Minha Casinha” e os estrondos de pás contra caras sincronizam com a batida da música.
Zé Pedro
Confesso que sou indiferente à canção. Seis linhas repetidas… Quantaz vezes? Quatro? Cinco? Mas a minha esposa gosta muito porque a música da nossa juventude tem sempre lugar especial nos nossos corações. Não sabia antes de começar este texto que os Xutos e Pontapés não escreveu a letra da canção: o original era parte da banda sonora dum filme dos anos quarenta do século passado chamado “O Costa* Do Castelo” Uau, que evolução imprevisível!
*= Why “O Costa”, not “A Costa”, given that Costa is a feminine noun? It’s because it’s not a noun at all, it’s the name of one of the characters in the film.
So slipping back into english, here are a few of the many manifestations of this song:
As I’ve said above, a well-known actress and singer named Maria de Lurdes de Almeida Lemos, better known as Milu sang it in a movie called O Costa do Castelo (1943) and wow, it really is almost unrecognisable. By the way, one of the commenters under the video has used an expression I mentioned a few days ago: “Nem a Grace Kelly lhe chegava aos calcanhares…”
Basically this is a very traditional song about the joys of being poor and pure at heart. This seems very much in keeping with the ethos of the dictatorship that was in place at the time.
In the eighties, Xutos e Pontapés started singing it for a laugh as a way of rounding off their shows and eventually recorded it on their album “88”. Here’s their version (they’re well into their later years in this recording, obviously)
They have stripped out the later verses about Christian humility and simplicity (neither of which is a punk virtue) and instead just taken the first verse and repeated it a few times, describing their top floor flat: “um (…) primeiro andar a contar vindo do céu” means “the first floor – if you’re counting down from the sky”, so the vibe your left with is more like a tower block anthem. This contrasts with Milu’s version which uses the same words but conjures more of a rose-tinted vision of life in a poky old house in an impoverished but proud neighbourhood in the Alfama.
The result is a pretty good anthem, as suitable for chanting on the football terraces as singing in the Coliseu.
When Metallica played Lisbon shortly after the death of Xutos’ lead guitarist Zé Pedro they chose this song as a tribute.
Xutos e Pontapés were also invited to make a video of the song to as a promo for the Spanish Netflix series A Casa De Papel (aka Money Heist)
And finally, here’s how it’s used in Operation Portugal with clanging shovels. Most of this is french of course, apart from the chant (“The people united will never be defeated”) and the soundtrack itself
Here are the lyrics:
As saudades que eu já tinha / The love I felt Da minha alegre casinha / For my happy little house Tão modesta quanto eu / As modest as I am Meu Deus como é bom morar / My god, it’s good to live Num modesto primeiro andar / On a humble first floor A contar vindo do céu / Counting down from the sky
… And then the additional verses that were dropped from the Xutos version…
O meu quarto lembra um ninho /My bedroom is like a nest e o seu tecto é tão baixinho / it’s cieling is so low que eu, ao ir para me deitar, /that when I go to bed abro a porta em tom discreto, / i open the door quietly digo sempre: «Senhor tecto, / and say “Mr Cieling, por favor deixe-me entrar.» / please let me come in”
Tudo podem ter os nobres / The gentry might have everything ou os ricos de algum dia, / Or the people who happen to be rich mas quase sempre o lar dos pobres / but almost always, poor people’s homes tem mais alegria. / have more joy
De manhã salto da cama / In the morning I jump out of bed e ao som dos pregões de Alfama /and to the sound of raised voices in the Alfama trato de me levantar, / I start waking up porque o sol, meu namorado, / because the sun, my beloved rompe as frestas no telhado / breaks through the gaps in the roof e a sorrir vem-me acordar. / and wakes me with a smile
Corro então toda ladina / Then I run, completely pure** na casa pequenina, /in the little house bem dizendo, eu sou cristão, / saying I’m a Christian “deitar cedo e cedo erguer / “Going to bed early and rising early dá saude e faz crescer” / makes you healthy and makes you grow” diz o povo e tem razão. / say the people and they are right.
Tudo podem ter os nobres / The gentry might have everything ou os ricos de algum dia, / Or the people who happen to be rich mas quase sempre o lar dos pobres / but almost always, poor people’s homes tem mais alegria. / have more joy
**=I’m not sure about the translation of “Ladina” meaning pure. According to Priberam, it’s an antiquated meaning, but it’s the only one that makes sense so I think it must have still be in current usage at the time the film was released.
I finished this easter crossword slightly late. It was one of the easier ones and I hardly even needed to use the dictionary.
One of the things I learned in the process was how you describe the clues. In English we say “one down” and “seventeen across”. In Portuguese the down clues are “vertical” and across “horizontal” but I’ve never been sure if it was “um da horizontal” or “um horizontal” or what.
So I asked:
Adoro fazer palavras cruzadas. Tenho um livros cheio de palavras cruzadas portuguesas. O autor é Paulo Freixinho e cada palavra cruzada tem um tema.
Uma coisa que não sei é como se referem os espaços (da grelha) e as pistas correspondentes. Por exemplo em inglês, dizemos “one down” para indicar a primeira pista no vertical” mas será que os portugueses dizem “um na vertical” ou “um vertical” ou “um para baixo” ou… Uma outra coisa?
The answer turns out to be pretty simple: it’s just “um vertical” and “um horizontal”. Boring but useful – at least if you are a crossword fan.
By the way, vertical and horizontal, when used as nouns, are feminine, but in spite of that its still “um vertical” not “uma vertical” because we’re not saying that there is one vertical, we’re referring to number one in the list of vertical clues.
I mentioned this guy’s YouTube channel a little while ago. He’s on Instagram now, and I’m glad I watched today’s video, because I had totally misunderstood this phrase. I thought it implied dishonesty – like the person was cunning and looking for a way to game the system for their own benefit but apparently not, it’s just someone who thinks they know everything.
I’ve been posting on twitter a lot today. I’m starting to feel a bit icky about my twitter identity though. I chose the assumed name of a Portuguese explorer, Pedro Álvares Cabral, because I wanted to just post as if I were Portuguese, but I’ve been feeling a bit off about it. I think this has really come to a head when discussing Ukraine. There are a lot of fake news bots out there pretending to be Brazilian or portuguese or whatever and talking shite about the war. I like a bit of twitter rough and tumble as much as the next idiot, so I will occasionally challenge these accounts but of course doing that while pretending to be a native of Portugal feels a bit disingenuous and the fact that I also make a lot of the kinds of mistakes only a foreigner would make means they can make the same charge back at me, pretending to think I am on the payroll of MI6 or whatever. Which I am, obviously, but they don’t know that.
So I’ve announced that I’m planning to change my identity to something that is more open about my origins (but still anonymous) so people have a better idea of where I’m coming from.
Now I just need to come up with a good alias…
🧵 👇
Fico cada dia mais desconfortável nesta conta de twitter. 😩
— Pedro Álvares Cabral 🇺🇦 (@Explorador1500) April 16, 2022
One of the great things about the Internet is the amount of mutual help that’s going on all the time. In Facebook and reddit people are helping each other with language queries, and I started doing some marking on the equivalent subreddit for English learners. I’ve actually gone a step beyond even that and taken part in an English speaking marathon on Zoom. I only stayed for an hour because its a sort of rolling membership with people coming and going. So the organisers would pair the participants up for ten minutes, speed-dating style, and at the end of each conversation, everyone would return to the main call and either leave or wait to be paired up again. I participated in 5 ten minute conversations with people from Hungary and Turkey. There were only two of us native speakers there and the rest were just sharing across language barriers. TBH I don’t know how helpful I was: I tend to gabble a lot as I’m quite socially awkward generally, but that’s OK. I think I’d like to do it some more but maybe write down some questions and just try to give a nice calm environment for other people to say what they want to say. In other words, try to be the sort of partner I would like if I were the learner in the conversation. These things can’t happen if people don’t help out, so it’s something good we can all do to just help someone along the path to fluency. Anyway, if you fancy giving it a go, the call is here between 3PM and 8PM on Saturday.
I must say though, it really reminds me how much I need some more conversation in my life. I’m really neglecting speaking Portuguese at the moment.
Episode 8963 of the series “words that mean wildly different things on different sides of the Atlantic”
Biscate seems like a useful word to have in your back pocket, but use it with care. In Portugal it refers to a side job, side huddle, or short term job. In the world of the gig economy, it seems like a good one to know.
Olha, aquele é mecânico nos estaleiros, mas faz uns “biscates” de electricidade por fora!
When this came up in online discussion, some Brazilian contributors found this funny because that’s not what it means in Brazil at all. Over there it refers to a woman who has lots of sexual partners – so equivalent to slut or slag or other derogatory terms.
A menina que ficava com todos garotos do colégio era chamada de biscate.
Today’s book exercise includes the phrase “de mãos a abanar”. Checking what ciberdúvidas has to say in the subject, it seems there are two possible variants, one more literal than the other
Ficar/Ir COM mãos a abanar usually means your hands really physically shake (but note, not shaking hands with someone else that’s “apertar as mãos” – you squeeze hands with someone.
Vir/Ficar/Ir DE mãos a abanar means to end up empty handed. Just like in English you can come away empty handed, without being able to gain from a situation, or you can turn up empty handed, with nothing to offer in a situation. The actual example in the book uses vir as the verb, but of course it depends on the situation you’re describing – whether they are setting off with nothing, coming away empty handed or whatever. I’ve also seen a Brazilian page describing “chegar de mãos abanando” which is obviously related. They use it to describe a situation where someone arrives at a party without a present or a bottle of wine or whatever. According to the writer this is related to immigrants to Brazil in the 19th century. If they were unskilled their hands would shake due to inability to use the tools of the trade. Pardon my skepticism but this sounds like bollocks to me.
Luso 