jueves, diciembre 16, 2004

Caving In To Cuteness

Message to anyone out there reading this: this blog will be bilingual from now on.

Spanish is my native tongue. I learned English very young, but Spanish is the language I was raised on, the language I spoke mostly until I was 18 years old, and the language spoken where I now live by my friends, coworkers, relatives, and self.

One of the motives for this blog was to exercise my written Spanish, which, neglected during my university years in the U.S. and France, was waxing a little, er, rusty. There I was, typing away my eñes, beginning my sentences with inverted question and exclamation marks, carefully making sure that all the right accents were placed over the right tonics. Often, however, I would find myself thinking in English and having to translate. English is a malleable, ductile tongue in ways Spanish — and, I suspect, most Romance languages, with the possible exception of Brazilian Portuguese — can't be. In Spanish, for instance, a McDonald's attendant wouldn't say "For here or to go?", but the wordier "¿Lo desea para comer aquí o para llevar?" (A French one would bark "Sur place ou pour emporter?" and not give a shit either way). A Spanish-speaking tourist at the end of the day in New York or Paris wouldn't be able to use the splendid "I'm all museumed out!", but have to resort instead to the blander "¡Estoy cansada de tanto museo!". And then there are things that are just plain untranslatable:

"Hey, these mofo neocons have out-McCarthy'd Joseph McCarthy!"

I won't even try. This blog will be bilingual from now on.

English allows cuteness. One cannot be cute in Spanish. If someone in, say, Colombia, wants to comment on, say, the attribute of the fluffy dog in the toilet paper commercial responsible for making you want to go out and buy toilet paper, she'll say "¡Mira que cuuuuuute!", because there is no perfect translation for cute in Spanish (adorable, in the way that we use it, doesn't quite mean the same thing). The very concept of cuteness is probably an American phenomenon, a memetic defense the mightiest country on Earth evolved to sugar-coat its power.

(By the way, the ability to verbalize anything is another example of the infinite combinatorial powers of English. You cannot unclumsily say "sugar-coat its power" in Spanish; you'd have to say something like "coat its power with sugar." For that matter, you can't really say "verbalize", either.)

Cuteness can be an undesirabale attribute of prose, but on the internet it might just be necessary. It is the only feature that saves weblogs from their inherent megalomania and their frequent narcissism. Here's some text from the "about me" page of a blog I like:

Interests

clean sheets, black cardigans, movies and movie stars, sweets, lipstick, communication tools, movies, pets, claire fontaine notebooks, new york school poets, freckles, fishnets, punk rock gay boys, wednesday matinees, fromage blanc, pies, comma-delimited lists

See what I mean? It's cute, isn't it? In Spanish it would never fly. It wouldn't be funny. It might not even be intelligible to certain people.

Here's a description from another blog which I found at random by clicking on the "next blog" button at the top of this page:

Anokoblog is the creation of a small, spiny nocturnal insectivore who lives at the end of the bar in his local pub. He has very poor eyesight, but a keen sense of smell. When not working on poetry, fiction and screenplays, he can be found munching on grubs and crickets, drinking straight bourbon whiskey, and discussing the issues of the day with a steady stream of statesmen, diplomats, and other criminals who visit him nightly seeking his sage advice.

Once again: cute, cute, cute. Untranslatable cuteness.

This blog, which will be bilingual from now on, promises to mete out cuteness in small, prudent doses.