Fomos a um restaurante ontem à noite para celebrar o aniversário da minha cunhada. Ela é enfermeira. Falámos das nossas vidas e vimos a minha filha a ficar bêbeda por provar vinho português. Quase todos nós comemos Bacalhau à Brás (ou seja “Braz”, segundo a ementa) mas a aniversariante e o seu namorado partilharam uma espetada madeirense (a minha mulher e as suas irmãs vieram de lá)
The exercises in the book I’m working through have themes to them. The last few have all been expressions involving body parts. The other day included one that said “Fugir a boca para a verdade” (The mouth runs rowards the truth) meaning if you don’t keep it under control, your mouth just blurts out what’s really on your mind. The very same day, I saw someone using it because George W Bush had given a speech and, as this tweeter commented, his big stupid mouth had done exactly that.
Here are a few of my favourites from the same exercise
Sete cães a um osso – lots of people are trying to lay claim to one thing, or the attention of one person
Estar debaixo da língua – equivalent to “on the tip of my tongue”
Ficar com um nó na garganta – equivalent to “have a lump in one’s throat”
Ter as costas largas – to be able to cope with a lot of responsibility
Acabei de ler um artigo no site do SIC Notícias que conta a história dum professor chamado Francisco Aguilar. O senhor acha que está a ser “perseguido” e “eliminado socialmente” porque a faculdade de Direito abriu um processo disciplinar pelo facto de ele estar a ensinar várias coisas tais como “o feminismo é algo parecido com o nazismo”.
Pois, é possível que a notícia seja exagerada. Havia muitos exemplos de professores a serem perseguidos por terem questionado uma ortodoxia que surgiu há cinco minutos no campo dos estudos de género, ou qualquer pecadinho que põe os cabelos azuis dos estudantes em pé. Mas o que me espantou, neste caso é que este homem, em vez de se defender, pediu asilo a “vários países incluindo à Rússia”. Muito bem, meu rapazinho, vais ter mil vezes mais liberdade na Rússia do que em Portugal!
I’d like to thank Heike Dio who commented under a recent post about the Dulce Pontes / Moonspell collab. She suggested I have a look at the Linda Martini performance on Antena 3 with Ana Moura on guest vocals. It’s good: very stylish and original, so I’m really glad to have it on my YouTube music playlist. I must say, I still prefer the chaos energy of the Dulce Pontes one though. I’ve been watching that at least once a day since I first found it. Here is Heike’s recommendatiin though, and I’ll try and translate the lyrics underneath because that’ll help me understand it.
If I Grow*
Espero que te venha o sono /I hope sleep comes to you
Que te deites cedo, antes de eu chegar /That you go to bed early before I arrive
Que isto de ser dois, longe do plural /Because this thing of being a couple, far from being plural
É tão singular /Is so singular
Paredes de empena / Gabled walls
Já nem vale a pena /It’s not even worth it any more
Resta-nos arder / Now it’s time for us to burn
Que esta chama lenta /Because this slow flame
Já virou tormenta** / Has become a firestorm
E ao entardecer / And as it gets late
Ninguém me diz / Nobody told me
O que há depois de nós / That there was something after us
E se depois de nós / And that after us both
Os dois me Agiganto / I’ll grow.
Eu já fui embora / And i left
Já marquei a hora / And i marked the time
Pra não me atrasar / So as not to be late
Já comprei bilhete / i bought a ticket
Deixei-te um bilhete / i left you a ticket
E a descongelar / And once thawed out
Os restos de ontem / Yesterday’s leftovers
Dão pra o jantar / Will be enough for dinner
Ninguém me diz / Nobody told me
O que há depois de nós / That there was something after us
E se depois de nós / And that after us both
Os dois me Agiganto / I’ll grow.
*=Agigantar literally means become a giant, but with that little reflexive pronoun, it becomes a verbo pronomial meaning “get bigger” so “grow” seems like a better translation.
**=Tormenta looks like it ought to mean “torment”. It actually means “storm” but I translated it as firestorm because a flame becoming a rainstorm doesn’t seem right.
Thanks to Patis12 for help with this one
Vhils é o nome artístico do Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto, que é um artista e grafiteiro. É principalmente conhecido pelas suas obras da arte pública que consistem em imagens esculpidas por explosivos que fazem pequenos buracos, deixando a tinta e os cartazes na superfície duma parede ou as costas dum edifício. A maioria das obras, espalhadas por todo o mundo, representam retratos, mas também tem criado uma guitarra portuguesa e várias frases e cenas. Já vi um cá em Londres nas traseiras de um parque. Achei-o impressionante, como a grande parte das suas composições.
Text based on yesterday’s post about sempre before and after the verb
Estou sempre a tentar melhorar o meu domínio desta língua. Depois do meu texto de ontem, fui informado que tinha repetido um erro de há uns dias. O texto conta a história da minha filha, e como a ajudo sempre com o seu trabalho de casa. Ontem, ela sempre enviou o código que ela escreveu com a minha ajuda.
Da mesma maneira como ela está sempre a melhorar a sua competência no campo da informática, eu quero tornar-me sempre mais fluente. Infelizmente, não tive muito tempo livre nos últimos dias mas sempre li as páginas recomendadas e acho que já entendo mais ou menos como errei.
When I was about 11 or 12 and learning Latin at school, my mum told me a rhyme she had for remembering the meaning of the word “semper”, meaning “always”: She’d say “Semper, semper, always keep your temper”.
It still works, most of the time, for the latin-derived word “sempre”. It usually means “always”, but there are exceptions. The first one you learn is “Sempre em frente”, meaning “straight ahead”, and there are a few other little expressions like “até sempre” and “para sempre” where it works with another word to mean something related but slightly different.
But even in normal usage, not part of an expression, it seems like the word order matters and it can change what it means depending where it comes in the sentence. I have made a couple of mistakes around this lately so I’ve been pointed to some examples. Here are a couple, shamelessly stolen from Reddit
O João sempre passou nos testes
O João passou sempre nos testes
In the first one, sempre goes before the verb, so it means “João ended up passing the tests”. Maybe he wasn’t expecting to pass but he managed to pull it off. Or maybe you weren’t sure but then you found out that, yes, yes he did.
In the second, sempre goes after the verb so it means what you expect it to mean – João was a smarty pants and every time he took a test he always passed it.
This seems to be a quirk of European Portuguese. In Brazil, it just means what you expect it to mean, regardless of the order, but in Europe, where you put it makes all the difference!
So, for us anglos, we need to resist the urge to put sempre where we would put it in our own language. “He always passed always the test”
There’s a video about it here if you’d rather hear about this from the horse’s mouth.
It’s hard to think of two musical. Genres that would be harder to turn into a crossover performance than Fado and Death Metal. And yet, if you think about it, is it that surprising a combination? They both deal in heavy stuff like death and despair, everyone’s wearing black and it’s all guitar-based (albeit a different kind of guitar). Fado is usually more subtle of course, but could it ever work? Well, here’s Dulce Pontes and Moonspell coming to test the theory at the Play Awards a few days ago.
It starts out with her singing fado and him not really able to keep up, and they go along together for a while, but by the end she’s pretty much reigning supreme over goth metal and he still can’t really keep up. The bit right at the end where he roars and she shrieks, but she can keep up the shrieking about four times as long as he can keep up the roar so he’s just left there staring at heaven from whence God’s vengeance cometh while she’s still belting out the same note. No prisoners taken!
The song they’re singing at the start is “Porque”, from Dulce’s latest album, and it’s based on a poem by Sophia De Mello Breyner Andresen. It’s expressing admiration for another person’s bravery and independence of spirit (“because others wear a mask but you don’t, because others use their virtue to pay for what can’t be forgiven – because others are afraid and you aren’t”) After the beat drops at about the half way mark, they’re onto Moonspell’s “In Tremor Dei“* which is a doom laden song about the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake “Lisbon in flames – a lantern lit, when a city falls another empire arises…” On the face of it, the two songs don’t seem to go well together, but the segue works because of the lyrics: at the end of the second verse of the fado, they sing together “porque os outros se calam mas tu não” – “because others keep quiet but you don’t.” Cue drums, guitar, crowd chanting and first pumping. Epic.
There were some other crossovers at the same show, like one between Nenny and Ana Moura, or between Camané, Agir and the Ukrainian Orthodox Choir, all good in their own ways of course, but this one is by far the most epic.
I’ve got tickets to see a Dulce Pontes concert that was delayed from last November to this November and I’m hoping she brings these lads with her now.
*Don’t panic if you’re struggling to translate the title – it’s Latin, not Portuguese!
I got so carried away the other day that I published a blog post with this title and no content at all. I’m a five-year-old at heart. By the time I’d finished reading the article I had planned to base it on, though, I’d changed my mind, because, despite being written in Portuguese, it doesn’t actually have much information about Portuguese culture. In fact, as you’ll see, I learned more about French than I did about Portuguese. I considered changing the title to “Peido and Peidjudice” or “Peidomaníaco”, “Peidogeddon” or “It’s Peidback Time” or something, but I just decided to stick with this title in the end so as not to disappoint anyone who saw the first post and had been holding their breath in expectation of the second.
Li um artigo no jornal Público sobre a História Cultural da Flatulência. O escritor não deu exemplos da flatulência na vida cultural portuguesa. Não faço ideia porquê. Os portugueses não se peidam? De qualquer maneira, o que mais me surpreendeu foi uma referência ao nome de uma personagem no filme do Mel Brooks, Blazing Saddles. O seu nome é Governor William J Le Petomane. O Le Pétomane original era um artista, antes da guerra, cujo nome significa “Peidomaníaco” por razões que são provavelmente óbvias. Apesar de ter visto o filme vezes sem conta, eu nem sequer sabia o significado do seu apelido.
It’s been a busy year in the Saudade mines and Portugal now has such a vast surplus of their untranslatable major export that they’ve taken to giving double portions away with every Eurovision entry. “Saudade, Saudade” is a good song. It’s a strange choice for a Eurovision entry, but that’s not a huge surprise: they’ve been sending strange choices to Eurovision for some time now and it keeps things interesting! I actually really struggled to listen to it on yesterday’s Eurovision final, because I was trying to tune in to the Portuguese lyrics but it wasn’t till the second listen that I realised it’s almost all in English! In my defence, there was a lot of background noise!
The only Portuguese verse (not counting the word “Saudade” itself of course) is
Tem tanto que trago comigo
Foi sempre o meu porto de abrigo
E agora nada faz sentido
Perdi o meu melhor amigo
E se não for demais
Peço por sinais
Resta uma só palavra
Which translates as
He has so much I carry inside myself
He was always my port in the storm
And now nothing makes sense
I lost my best friend
And if its not too much,
I ask for a sign
Only one word remains
By the way, we set out to get a range of snacks from lots of European nations to eat while watching but we ended up just loading up on cakes from the Portuguese stall at Richmond’s Duckpond Market
Luso 