Play of the day

This play of the day is really a play of many days: my tattoo.

Porteños love my tattoo. Not a week passes without someone commenting on, asking about, or staring at it. Just today I caught a gringo on a bus eyeing my arm. This has meant I have had to learn to explain it in Spanish. I’m able to do this relatively well, although it is considerably easier to explain its history in my own tongue. My description here in Buenos Aires goes something like this: “Es un diagrama que viene de un texto de la lingüística por Ferdinand de Saussure. Indica la distancia entre lo que decimos o escribimos y lo que queremos decir.”

This usually works, though I’ve been asked to further explain, which I do, usually by giving an example. Like this: “Cuando decimos ‘perro,’ hay una distancia conceptual entre la palabra y el perro de que estamos hablando. La palabra y la cosa no son nunca la misma cosa.”

I can’t say that Saussure would be particularly pleased with my interpretation, but surely he would have understood the attempt. The point is this: the tattoo is the best conversation starter I’ve had throughout my stay here. It is the easiest way to meet a stranger, to talk to someone new. It also serves as a marker of who I am. The fishmonger down the block remembers me because of it, so does the jeweler at the closest ferria. Even the girl who works at the university coffee shop remembers me as “la chica con el tatuaje genial.” She goes straight for the espresso machine to make my café con leche.

This is made all the more satisfying because it is a tattoo about language, about the difficulty of saying what one means. Needless to say, I have trouble saying what I mean all the time, in any language.

Marking oneself in such a way gives your body a different sort of life. You become a text. The danger, of course, is that like all texts, you cannot control its readings, its life on the page or the arm or the screen. Your mark bears with it all kinds of meanings, many of which you might wish it did not. In the end, I suppose, this is true of all of the things we use to indicate who we are, tattoos or words or anything else. That glance from the other seems forever to read us in ways we do not read ourselves or do not wish to be read. This is a glorious thing, sometimes, and a wretched thing, sometimes.

Either way: here’s to the moments when at least the act of reading or speaking brings the word and the thing it is supposed to mean at least a little bit closer together–even if only for a moment and even if the gap between them, though mitigated, always looms. And to the moments when, if you’re lucky, you can communicate something, anything, about who you are to the people around you.

Of Lunfardo

The time has finally come, dear readers, to let you in on the fascinating and ridiculously difficult phenomenon, specific to Buenos Aires, known as lunfardo. Lunfardo is the bizarro and glorious dialect of Spanish often spoken in the city. Birthed from the conventillos (tenements) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this particular language (one scholar calls it “a devilishly bastardized Spanish” and “the most widespread linguistic product of twentieth-century Buenos Aires”*) arose as immigrants to the country mixed their own languages with that of their new home: Spanish, Italian, French, Galician, Catalan, Yiddish, Russian, Arabic, French, Polish, Greek, Turkish–you name the language and you can probably find a word in lunfardo with a corresponding root. It’s fabulous and fabulously difficult to understand, particularly because (like all dialects) it continues to change. In addition to mixing these languages, lunfardo also depends upon inversions. Not unlike the French argot, verlan, lunfardo inverts syllables of common words. For example café becomes feca, mujer becomes jermu. These are the easy ones, however, because sometimes adept lunfardo speakers invert words that are already mixes of Spanish and any of the myriad other languages which help compose the dialect. When that happens, needless to say, if you aren’t a local, you’re lost.

That’s not all. Lunfardo is the best known local dialect but another, cocoliche, also fought its way into being at the turn of the century. A pidgin between Italian and Spanish, cocoliche seems to have more or less vanished by the 50s, but my bet is its influence on the spoken language of the city was strong enough to leave a lingering vocabulary in its wake. It’s nice to know, however, that these ways of speaking are so flexible, so tactical in their responses to the dominant idiom that sometimes two contemporary, life-long local speakers can misunderstand each other. Makes you feel a little less bad as an outsider.

And a final note on the porteño way of speaking: They use ‘vos’ instead of ‘tu’ in addressing the second person singular. ‘Vos’ is a sort of bastardized version of the now relatively antiquated Spanish ‘vosotros.’ The voseo porteños use means you can’t conjugate verbs in the present tense or in the command form when the subject is ‘you’ the way you would in, say, Ecuador (where I happened to learn my Spanish). Instead of “de donde eres” to ask “where are you from,” you ask “de donde sos.” Instead of “tienes algo de comer” for “do you have something to eat” you ask “tenés algo de comer.” When you want to use the command form it isn’t “ven” for “come,” it’s “vení”. This is absolutely confounding when you first arrive, but when you start to get the hang of it, you love it. It’s like a prize you win for sticking it out. At this point I switch between the more common ‘tu’ form I learned oh so many years ago and the ‘vos’ form I’m picking up here. They understand me either way, but I bet I sound pretty ridiculous.

Here’s the great thing about such linguistic mutations, though. My own weird little enunciations in all the dialects I’m trying to speak here, somewhere down the line, might do a thing or two to change the way castellano is spoken in Buenos Aires. If it weren’t for the massive waves of immigration that came some 100 plus years ago lunfardo could never have come into being. Making mistakes in a language you don’t quite yet speak might just be the way, in the end, to make it your own.

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*Adriana J. Bergero, Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Pg. 95.

A little translation project

Oh reader, what glory is the world of Porteño indie rock! I have had two forays, quite distinct but equally lovely, into this particular cultural phenomenon. The first was a show that an Argentine friend of mine played in the barrio San Telmo at a bar called La Cigale. This odd fellow looks a little bit like a porteño Prince (or the artist formerly known as). Seriously. He wears, always, un chaleco with some sort of ironic t-shirt–though, to be honest, I’m not sure if they’re ironic or not in his world, but they certainly work that way in mine. From one of his ears dangles a silver feather. This manner of dress, from which I have not once seen him stray, functions as a kind of signature for him. He plays guitar and sings accompanied by another guitarist and vocalist, a bassist and a drummer. He claims his music is influenced by the Strokes but I’m not sure I hear it.

This show was more or less like any amateur show you can attend in the states: a crowd of onlookers far too small to warrant the volume, an entirely unnecessary smoke machine (a good half of the audience was smoking during the performance), and crappy acoustics. The beer was overpriced but delicious. The most appreciative audience members were friends of the band.

My second jaunt into this cultural underbelly (and what will likely be of greater interest to you, dear readers) is a little project in which I’m taking part. I’ve been asked by another local musician to help translate Belle & Sebastian lyrics into English. So far we’ve met once and managed our way through three songs. But imagine, if you will, trying to explain “Stars of Track and Field” in a language that isn’t your own. Or trying to communicate a Bob Dylan reference, or a common phrase like “caught a glimpse.” In those three hours I learned more local slang than I have during the rest of my nearly month-long stay here. He was so thrilled with the translations that we’re continuing the work tomorrow (and, likely, throughout my time here).

This musician has a real obsession with the aesthetic of the 80s, by the way. Too early to say whether this is a broad cultural phenomenon among hipsters in this town or specific to these two.

Word up:

My friends, I deliver unto you a fabulous web site which you may have already discovered via my tweets or my where to go page: buenosairesword. The graffiti in Buenos Aires is fantastic, as is the commercial and municipal typography all over the place. By fantastic I do not mean ‘high design’ (though this exists in spades in parts of Buenos Aires). I mean rich. There are such varieties of color and shape, juxtapositions, and bizarre conflicts between texts that you can pretty much stare at any wall and be mesmerized. Play around with the aforementioned site (it will be easier if you can read Spanish, but a few clicks here and there and you’ll probably figure it out even if you don’t). You will a.)not be disappointed and b.) get a little sense of the typographical aesthetics of the city.

'Aca'

This, my comrades, is the word used for ‘here’ in Buenos Aires. Those of us trained in the Spanish language by U.S. institutions often have trouble adjusting to its sound. We prefer ‘aqui’ to ‘aca’ if for no reason other than its ubiquity in the ‘asking directions’ section of first-year Spanish textbooks. It seems appropriate to begin my little blogging experiment with this word because, of course, here I am. And because, just like the word ‘aca’ in my mouth, I am awkward.

For those of you interested in Argentine slang, I have discovered this useful link. For those of you interested in my musings on the city, you’ll have to wait. Tomorrow I plan to settle into an apartment and from there I will begin the whirlwind writing of dissertation chapters and blog posts.

Until then, my little friends, romans and countrymen, saludos!