So we find ourselves on another Sunday night, not gazing into a philosophical abyss, just the practical pit of the working week ahead.

It has been a weekend of DVD cinema: I watched La Habitación de Fermat last night, a film I didn't realise was in Spanish until I brought it home. Cheesy, and peopled with those faux-intellectual hot people that ( Read more... )

I am struggling to express anything sensibly at the moment, but the humour of this one is hard to miss. Here's number three, which is itself a translation from Saxon or some other Old Germanic language I think:

( El Enemigo Generoso )

Exercise #1 saw me translating "el olvido" -- forgetfulness (or as Reid has it, oblivion) as "the forgotten thing", which would actually be something like "el olvidado", or probably "la cosa olvidada". Now for exercise #2, "Spinoza":

( Spinoza )

You may recall that Max and I spent a large proportion of last year -- about five or six months -- in Spanish-speaking countries. As a consequence I learnt to speak a functional smattering of traveller's Spanish, enough to get by in common situations and to discuss basic concepts with the locals. Spanish isn't a hard language to start to learn, ( Read more... )