I’ve got obsessed with this song by Márcia (she’s the one in the video I posted a couple of weeks back). I don’t like this one as much, but it has a hidden secret: it has a Spanish pronoun (“Usted”) in it for no reason I can fathom. It isn’t needed for a rhyme, and no other Spanish words appear in it. She uses a more conventional “você” in a different verse. It’s well random. It’s as if an anglophone singer just decided to say… Oh I don’t know – “Though I put you on a pedastal, they put vous on the pill”
Anyway I made a translation (not a good one, I think) to try and get to grips with it to understand why, but I’m none the wiser.
Well, this Eurovision semifinalist is definitely bonkers. It reminds me of António Variações, the cosmic electro-beardie from the eighties, reading out the warranty redemption for a damaged iPhone. Anyway, I don’t know if he’ll be picked but he seems like a strong contender: stronger, anyway, than the unbearably tedious, over-earnest drivel by DAMA that was controversially beaten out on a tie-breaker,and better than last year’s too, but it’s still no Salvador Sobral.
Off-the-cuff reactions to Portuguese bands I was recommended by a friend of mine.
Ornatos Violeta
Funk/punk in the style of fishbone, maybe chilli peppers at a push, or some of the more grungey elements from the same eta (STP, Blind Melon). Definitely going on my Spotify library anyway.
Mão Morta
Some kind of Doom Metal, I think… Er… Well, see for yourself.
Belle Chase Hotel
Trilingual combo whose name is based on a Jim Jarmusch movie. Musically pretty good and playing in a variety of styles (so much so that at first I wondered if maybe there was more than one band that shared the name) but frustrating if, like me, you only want to hear PT lyrics, because they don’t seem to have many. One of the members is JP Simões who is also a solo artist who sings in Portuguese.
Sean Riley & the Slowriders
What? Dudes, do you even speak Portuguese?
Wray Gunn
Er… Again, struggling to find any Portuguese titles here. Rock ‘n’ Roll of the school of Link Wray. I had a look at the first one in the list and it seems to be about sleeping with his sister. No thank you. Do not want.
Minta & the Brook Trout
Really, really good but disappointingly anglophone
Jerónimo
I can only find three one songs by this lot and all English too
First Breath After Coma
Remind me of the Durutti Column or some of those post-rock bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor. The tracks I listened to were largely instrumentals with maybe some samples voices but not in Portuguese. Interesting and I’ll listen again but not really what I was after…
X-wife
Pretty decent indie dance band but again, not singing in Portuguese
Legendary Tigerman
Rock. Pretty good but English lyrics again.
Dead Combo
I really like this music. It’s quirky and energetic. They have a collab with Marc Ribot, who’s worked with Tom Waits, which should give an idea of the genre. A lot of the track titles are in Portuguese, but they’re not very loquacious and it’s mainly instrumental stuff.
Ornatos Violeta are my pick of the bunch here, being eminently listenable and with Portuguese lyrics, but they’re in no danger of displacing Deolinda in my affections!
It often happens that when I learn a new phrase I suddenly notice it popping up everywhere – in videos or in song lyrics that, previously, I had mentally marked as indecipherable. After I wrote the post about Chico-Espertice the other day I spotted it in a Deolinda song (have I mentioned I like Deolinda? I have? Oh!) called Manta Para Dois (“Blanket for two”). I wondered how it had been translated, to see if I’d understood it right.
I found the english lyrics here. They’ve translated
Às vezes és parvo
Gabarola, mal-criado
É preciso muita pachorra para ti
Cromo, chico-esperto
Preguiçoso e incerto
Mas é certo que és perfeito para mim
as
Sometimes you’re stupid
You brag, you have no manners
I need a lot of calmness to deal with you
Silly, fancy and smart
Lazy and uncertain
But it’s obvious you’re perfect for me
Well, that’s not what I was expecting. I think this must be wrong though. I think the translator must live in a region where the expression isn’t used. Everything else in that paragraph is a list of faults the person has, in spite of which she loves the guy anyway, so throwing a couple of compliments in makes no sense, especially if they’re joined together with a hyphen instead of a comma. I think it should say
Sometimes you’re stupid
You brag, you have no manners
I need a lot of patience to deal with you
Silly, a smartarse
Lazy and uncertain
But it’s obvious you’re perfect for me
Or maybe “a pisstaker” or “too clever by half” or something like that.
Video here
By the way, that word “Cromo” is interesting too. It’s translated as “Silly” and Priberam gives it as
Diz-se de ou pessoa que tem um comportamento considerado estranho excêntrico ou ridículo . “cromo”, in Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa [em linha], 2008-2013, https://dicionario.priberam.org/cromo [consultado em 24-09-2018].
but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it used to mean “nerd” or “geek”
One of the chapters in Reaccionário Com Dois Cês is an obituary for Raul Solnado, who I’d never heard of. He died in 2009 and was recognised as one of the greats of portuguese comedy. Here he is in front of an audience in the sixties or seventies, telling a rambling story of the war of 1908. Top quality R-rolling.
I was sent this video by my Brazilian language partner and its a pretty good illustration of the language barrier between the two sides of the atlantic. Note that the Portuguese guy (Caesar Mourão, one of the comedians on the line-up of the comedy festival I mentioned yesterday) understands the tourists because the Portuguese are so used to listening to Brazilian “Novelas” but they have no idea what he’s on about.
So I’m trying to sort out some basic grammar that I probably should have worked out a long time ago. To do this, I’ve been working with a different teacher who lives in the UK, simply because I don’t have the skills to be able to even ask the question in Portuguese and I needed someone who would understand me asking in english
Today: What’s the difference between these ways of exressing possession.
A sua propriedade
Propriedade sua
A propriedade dele
It always seems a bit random and I’ve never quite been able to spot a pattern. The third one is the obvious odd one out because it’s the only one that makes it clear that it’s the property of “him”, whereas the others could all be him, her, them, or, if you’re being formal, the person you’re speaking to, so in a way that helps – you could use when you wanted to be very specific about who it belongs to. In practice, I’m told, it’s also used in less formal, spoken situations.
As for the first and second, the answer seems to be simpler than I thought though: it just depends whether you have a definite article in there. If it’s a specific thing: this is his property, it’s “a sua propriedade”, whereas the second quote, which comes from my review of the film Comboio de Sal e Açúcar is about the subject’s attitude: he treated the passengers as his property.
O livro é de um amigo meu [indefinite article: it belongs to a friend of mine]
O livro é do meu amigo [definite article: it belongs to my friend]
Now, here’s the shock though: I had been thinking of these words – seu, meu, minha, etc as possessive pronouns, but they’re not, they’re determinantes – more like adjectives, really: In “o meu amigo”, “amigo” is the noun and “meu” just determines whose friend he is. Meu can also be a possessive pronoun but only when it stands in for the noun.
“O Donald, as suas mãos são pequenas; as minhas são grandes”. In this sentence, “suas” is another determinant but “minhas” is a possessive pronoun because I’m using it instead of saying the whole noun again “as minhas maãos”. In english it’s doing the job of “mine” instead of just “my”. There are some other examples, explained in portuguese on Ciberdúvidas.
OK, simple, I can understand a couple of simple rules like that. I guess, though, it’s like most rules in english: you obey them only insofar as you can do so without writing something ugly. So I cam across a counter-example within about ten minutes of this conversation happening in the song “Saia Rodada” by Carminho. I’ve pasted the lyrics below and highlighted forms that match in green and the one that doesn’t in red.
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Vem lá de longe da cidade e tem
Os olhos rasos de saudade em mim
E eu mando-lhe beijos e recados em retratos meus
Pensa em casar no fim do verão que vem
Antes pudesse o verão não mais ter fim
Que eu estou tão nervosa com esta coisa do casar
Meu Deus
Vesti a saia rodada
P’r’ apimentar a chegada
Do meu amor
No mural postei as bodas
Rezei nas capelas todas
Pelo meu amor
Por tantas vezes pensei eu também
Sair daqui atrás dos braços seus
De cabeça ao vento e a duvidar o que faz ele por lá
I think all that’s happening here is that she’s stretched the normal rules to make the rhyme with “adeus” work in the next triplet. I’ve added it to my list of questions for next time.
Anyway, as a side note, I wondered what a “saia rodada” was anyway. A round skirt? I googled it and saw a load of pictures of… well… skirts. So I asked online and was told it would all make sense if I searched for videos of “saia rodada danca” but it didn’t work because there’s an insupportable brasilian rock band called saia rodada and this is the first video I got.
But then a portuguese guy mentioned that it was “folclorico” so I added that into my search and had more luck. Apparently it’s a long, swishy skirt that is used in a lot of dances because of the way it moves. Here are some people demonstrating. Tag yourself, I’m the guy in the grey trousers.
WHew! It’s been a long time since I wrote this much about grammar and general musings. Well, come for the determinantes possessivos, stay for the grupo folclórico.
Luso 