REELING AND WRITHING V: CULTURAL REFERENCES

REELING AND WRITHING
or,
Miss Dermark's 2015 Advent Calendar

DAY FIVE

CULTURAL REFERENCES
or
CLERGYMEN'S WIVES, SUMAC, AND "LA GOTA FRÍA"


When I was a child, born and raised in a Spanish bourgeois Catholic environment, Andersen's mentions of clergymen's wives in, for instance, "The Red Shoes" puzzled me:
The pastor’s wife had pity on her, and took her into service. 
Mind that the Spanish version I read said "La esposa/mujer del sacerdote", without any Protestant innuendo. (The original Danish version has præstekonen.)
To my Catholic child mind, it seemed unlikely! A priest who is married? At least the typical Spanish curates have got their housekeepers or "amas de llaves" ("perpetue" in Italian): not their wives, but their servants.
It took until my adolescence with more frequent trips to Sweden and learning about the Reformation at History class to discover Protestantism and the difference between these creeds and the Catholic one. I have met both pastors' wives and female pastors in my other home country.
In a British text I had to translate at Jaime I University three years ago, the expression "Mrs. Reverend" popped up. I was the only one at class who could understand the reference and teach it to the other students. My version translated "Mrs. Reverend" as "la señora Reverenda, la mujer del Reverendo."

Not very lately, I re-read an online corpus of Palestinian Islamic folktales. One of them in particular, "Sumac, You Bastard! Sumac!" attracted me because of its unusual title. At first I thought Sumac was the hero's name, but, when I reached the coda, it turned out that it was not that way.
The brave young hero has got two lions as pets, and all three slay his voracious ghoul sister, whose blood falls on the ground. But this is not the end of the story. A caravan passes by and its impressed leader wants the big kitties for his own, so he takes a bet with the lions' owner:

As he was resting with the lions beside him, two merchants approached, leading a loaded caravan. When they saw the lions, they admired them and wanted them for themselves.

"Young man!" they called out.

"Yes," he answered, "what can I do for you?"

"How would you like to make a bet with us?" they asked. "If you can guess what merchandise we're carrying, you can take the caravan and its load. But if you can't guess, we'll take these two lions."

"All right," he agreed, "I'm willing."

He started guessing: "nuts, fava beans, lentils, wheat, rice, sugar ..." It was no use; he could not guess. When he was stumped, with no chance of guessing, the merchants took the lions with them and moved on.

By Allah, they had not led those lions very far away when a drop of blood, which had fallen from his sister to the ground when the lions ate her, shouted out, "Sumac! You bastard, sumac!"

After the merchants the brother ran. "Wait! Uncles, wait!" he exclaimed. "I can guess what your load is. It's sumac!"

Having guessed, he took his lions back and got the caravan with its load.

This is my tale, I've told it, and in your hands I leave it.

"Sumac", with a lower-case s (it's a common noun), is the cargo of the caravan. When I first read the story at the age of 16-17, I read it because of the title, an insult with exclamations! But now I realized that the sumac was the cargo. What was it... some spice (good guess)? So I googled "sumac". It IS a spice, a crimson powder, closely related to cashew. The Spanish word for this condiment is "zumaque", and it's "sumak" in Swedish.
Of course, sumac is far more popular in the Middle East than here in Europe, and thus, very few of us Europeans know the spice exists.
When I tell the story to Swedes in their language, I call the sumac "sumak" (instead of, for instance, the more international "curry." After all, sumac sounds funnier and more unusual than curry), and explain to them that it's a spice, crimson red, related to cashew. Otherwise, most of them would not even get a clue.

The next reference I am going to cover is to the climate of my birthplace, the Spanish East Coast. Rains here are a rather rare occurrence, and, when it rains, it pours down, especially in autumn. Some years, there have been considerable autumn floods, especially in the coastal lowlands. The phenomenon is known as "la gota fría" (literally, "the cold drop"). I retain the Spanish name of this phenomenon, add the literal translation (between parentheses), and explain it concisely as "autumn flood".

To quote a good example from "The Snow Queen", Story the Fourth:
the "pebernödder" (ginger nuts) that the royal carriage is filled with become "des croquignoles" (the French national pastry) in the Alexandre Dumas translation-expansion, and "rosquillas de alajú" (a kind of nougat) in the Spanish translation by Jimena Licitra: the Scandinavian local colour is lost in both cases (and replaced with French/Spanish local colour instead!). The Romanian translation says "covrigi" (salty and ring-shaped "Romanian pretzels"). And Marià Manent, the Catalan canon author, opts for "cireres de ginebró", which refers to juniper berries instead of any kind of pastry... while Albert Jané's more modern Catalan translation has "pa de pessic", ie sponge cake. On the other hand, remaining true to the spirit of Andersen and to Scandinavian/Germanic culture, Italian translations say "panpepato", and the Spanish versions I praise the most, Alfonso Nadal's to begin with, employ "panes de especias" (Nadal, for instance) or "panes de jengibre". And the official French Andersen, which says "pain d'épices".
Not to mention that Germanic languages keep the reference, be it "gingerbread nuts" (English), "Pfeffernüsse" (German), "pepparnötter" (Swedish), "pepernoten" (Dutch/Flemish)... for the referent exists within their culture, it's part of the cultural heritage they share with Danish culture.
Esperanto goes for "spiconuksoj", Polish for "piernik", and Hungarian for "mézescsók": the last of these choices is the one closest to the concept of gingerbread nuts.
Russian translation has "пряниками" ("prinikami"), which is a Slavic word related to "piernik", while Croatian has "kolača" and "medenjaka"; the former refers to any kind of cake, while the latter specifies honey-based Croatian gingerbread. Last of all, the FutureLearn John Irons English translation has "small spicy biscuits."

After all, some cultural references are butchered in translation, and here you have but a tad of the proof (when we come to Blâvinge, who was made Licenea rather than the more suiting Alazul, and to how Sybill Trelawney was turned into a more suiting Sibilla Cooman, we'll see failures and improvements when it comes to translating speaking names)...