Saturday, September 06, 2003
Today in Argentina the president is struggling against the IMF (International Monetary Fund). It's the karma of the Third World countries, I suppose. We must do a lot of things to reconstruct this country, yet they are asking to raise taxes, pay the banks, etc. They act as if they were lawyers to the big international companies. Some intellectual wrote in a newspaper today that we have an external debt and an internal debt, and that we can't pay one at the expenses of the other. The internal debt are those things Argentina must do to lift its head once for good: give money to education, public health, to create more jobs. How much more a country must wait? How much longer will we accept pressures and briberies from that international lobby called IMF?
Thursday, September 04, 2003
I am reading a book called "Scrivere = Incontrare", and relating to my previous post I find there:
"It seems to me that a culture is, first of all and above all, a language" (my translation).
That was a kind of answer to some Jesús Royo Arpón, who wrote in the Spanish newspaper "El País" more or less the following lines:
"I write with Latin letters, that come from the Phoenicians, through the Greeks and the Etruscans. The language I speak comes from Latin, with a 15% of Arabian. I was baptized in a religion that is a heresy of the Jew orthodoxy, which in turn is a heresy of the Egyptian monotheism. I count the minutes, the hours and the months like the Babilonians. The paper I'm using to write was invented in China, just like the fireworks and the gunpowder. The number of my bank account is written with Arabian numbers, that seems they have been copied from the ones used in India. The music I hear was invented by the sons of the slaves imported in America by the Catalonian, Andalusian or Dutch slave traders. As for life, I share it equally with the rest of the human race. What is, after all, my culture?"
I suppose Anthony Phelps (one of the authors of the book) translated that from Spanish to French, someone translated it to Italian for the book I'm reading, and I translate it clumsily again to English. But I agree with that assertion: my culture is mainly my language. To write in English is for me like when you lower the resolution of your PC screen: from millions of colours down to 16 basic tones. Not because Spanish is better than English, but because "my knowledge of Spanish is less perfect than my ignorance of English", misquoting Borges.
As a side note, in any case the Blogger does not want me to use the Spanish accents, on "El País", "Jesús", "Arpón"... let it be all English.
Update: I learned how to use the accents, after all...
"It seems to me that a culture is, first of all and above all, a language" (my translation).
That was a kind of answer to some Jesús Royo Arpón, who wrote in the Spanish newspaper "El País" more or less the following lines:
"I write with Latin letters, that come from the Phoenicians, through the Greeks and the Etruscans. The language I speak comes from Latin, with a 15% of Arabian. I was baptized in a religion that is a heresy of the Jew orthodoxy, which in turn is a heresy of the Egyptian monotheism. I count the minutes, the hours and the months like the Babilonians. The paper I'm using to write was invented in China, just like the fireworks and the gunpowder. The number of my bank account is written with Arabian numbers, that seems they have been copied from the ones used in India. The music I hear was invented by the sons of the slaves imported in America by the Catalonian, Andalusian or Dutch slave traders. As for life, I share it equally with the rest of the human race. What is, after all, my culture?"
I suppose Anthony Phelps (one of the authors of the book) translated that from Spanish to French, someone translated it to Italian for the book I'm reading, and I translate it clumsily again to English. But I agree with that assertion: my culture is mainly my language. To write in English is for me like when you lower the resolution of your PC screen: from millions of colours down to 16 basic tones. Not because Spanish is better than English, but because "my knowledge of Spanish is less perfect than my ignorance of English", misquoting Borges.
As a side note, in any case the Blogger does not want me to use the Spanish accents, on "El País", "Jesús", "Arpón"... let it be all English.
Update: I learned how to use the accents, after all...
I opened this blog, and my first question was naturally "which language should I use here?". I'm not that comfortable writing in English, being Spanish my mother tongue. I have friends who will complain if I decide to write in English, but on the other hand I have friends who can't read Spanish at all. So be it English (sigh). Reading my guestbook, I'm pleased to see that encompasses several languages (Spanish, English, Italian, German, Bulgarian...), and I think all those people came to my page when it was originally only written in English. Like it or not, English became the lingua franca, but it feels like a betrayal to avoid the good old Spanish, doesn't it.
Taking a look at the access statistics for my page, I realized that many people use the Google translation service to translate the pages I have written in English... to Spanish. I felt ashamed, and pushed to translate all I could to my native language. More when those pages were speaking about my travels to my own country. At this moment, when I already translated all I could back to Spanish, I see that the pages I wrote originally in my tongue can't be translated that easily to English. Someone would say that it's because I don't use Spanish, I abuse it; the fact is that they must be rewritten in English, or not translated at all. I remember that sentence again, "traduttore, traditore", and indeed the act of translation feels like a betrayal.
Taking a look at the access statistics for my page, I realized that many people use the Google translation service to translate the pages I have written in English... to Spanish. I felt ashamed, and pushed to translate all I could to my native language. More when those pages were speaking about my travels to my own country. At this moment, when I already translated all I could back to Spanish, I see that the pages I wrote originally in my tongue can't be translated that easily to English. Someone would say that it's because I don't use Spanish, I abuse it; the fact is that they must be rewritten in English, or not translated at all. I remember that sentence again, "traduttore, traditore", and indeed the act of translation feels like a betrayal.
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