Free-D

Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but local power corrupts in a rather petty, sordid way – ideals give way to mediocrity and the occasional backhander. You get what you vote for.

There are jokes which cross boundaries, and there are jokes which rely on national cultural and linguistic quirks. Then, every now and then, there is a joke that is so “in” that it’s only a privileged few that will ever benefit from its humour. Trust VG to come up with a joke that is not just localised but dependent on a very specific time frame – if you haven’t been here for the last fifteen years living and breathing Salamancan air, I might as well be reading you the shipping forecast. The joke is simple enough: “Hemos salido de Málaga para llegar a Lanzarote.”
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With his usual imaginative flair for the English language my son informed me this week, that they were choosing a new manager for the village. His attitude to politics is spot on

He told me that he wouldn’t be voting for anyone, and even when I broke the news to him that he couldn’t actually vote till he was 18 in any case, he remained unperturbed. “It’s stupid to vote,” he told me, “because I don’t know who they are and I don’t care who wins.” Being a card-carrying democrat (though not in the American sense) I tried to explain to him that it was our privilege and our moral duty to vote, but he looked at me, singly unimpressed and I realised that I had been rumbled; he knows exactly when I mean what I say and when I don’t. The sad fact is that the privilege I really enjoy is the right not to vote, and I very much sympathise with his standpoint. I know how I would like our systems to be run, it’s just that the people that end up running the show invariably disappoint. And it’s more than that: I find it even more depressing and upsetting to have a marginally favourable candidate than one that is an anathema to me. It’s better to have someone up there you can really hate than someone ywho simply disappoints you.

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Yes, the biggest bigot this side of the Klu Klux Klan, the Protestant Loyalist the Reverend Ian Paisley, and Martin Mac-Guinness, ex-IRA terrorist, joined together to take on the role of ruling Northern Ireland. I shall be perfectly frank, if you’d asked me ten years ago if these were the most suitable men to oversee this anomaly of a province, I would have answered quite emphatically, not. And if you’d have predicted that the two men would actually join hands – metaphorically, at least, because Paisley still refuses a physical handshake – I’d have scoffed at the merest idea. But here it is – miracles do happen… at least in Northern Ireland.

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There was perfect communication between them, they moved like a well-oiled machine, and though they were from different continents they spoke a single language

Someone once said – I can’t for the life of me remember who – that the Nobel Prize for Literature usually went to writers whose work was particularly easy to translate into Swedish. Seems like a reasonable assertion to me; after all, how much can you distinguish the brilliance of the original from the brilliance of its translation. Even a simple noise like Lorca’s ¡Ay! is virtually impossible to pitch with the right sense of naturalism within an English context. I think I may have mentioned some time ago the ridiculous literal translations of Spanish dialogues in Chris Stewart’s “Driving over Lemons” – an otherwise quirky portrait of an Englishman making good in Andalusia, - in which Hostias was literally translated as “By the Host” and other such incongruities.

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