…and, when times are hard, it takes a readership to write a blog. So this one is dedicated to you, various friends and family members, whose reactions to previous posts, and whose chance comments, will be providing the vast majority of today’s musings.
As I kid myself that you may not have noticed, the content of these posts has been getting a bit thin of late. (This isn’t, I think, true of last week’s post, which I have been clutching close to my chest since last December, when I first researched it, because I knew that I wanted to save the big reveal until Lag b’Omer.) The truth is that, like any self-respecting squirrel, I have to spend our time in Portugal stockpiling my amusing and fascinating insights into Portugal and my relation to it, and then hope that this store will last me through the bleak months of away-from-Taoness until we are next able to fly. So, when we returned from our first trip, late last November, I had more than enough chestnuts buried to see me through December and January. On our second trip, I had to hunt a little harder for supplies, having picked most of the low-hanging fruit the previous time. So, since our return to Israel in March, I have watched my supplies dwindle.
And now, just this week, we reluctantly cancelled our next trip. We had been due to fly on 8 June, but we eventually faced the fact that that was not going to happen. We are still fairly optimistic that we will be able to get to Portugal this summer. This optimism is based on a number of factors. Both Israel and Portugal seem to have fared better than average in handling the Covid-19 pandemic. Both Israel and Portugal are economically dependent on international tourism, and are therefore eager to reopen their borders as soon as possible. Ben Gurion (Tel Aviv) airport is scheduled to reopen on 1 June. We would be perfectly happy to spend our first two weeks in Portugal ‘isolating’ with the kids, and not going out. My travel insurance agent assures me that our policy would cover us for contracting Covid-19 while in Portugal. So, all things considered, we are hoping, and fairly hopeful, that we will be able to get there this summer.
Meanwhile, however, I have hardly anything left in my blog storehouse. So, let’s start today with some housekeeping.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the challenge of learning Portuguese, and about the amusement to be had from foreign-language phrasebooks. My good friend Joe contacted me twice after that post. First, he recommended to me Pimsleur’s foreign language online courses. I signed up and find myself making encouraging progress. The course is uncompromising in its presentation of dialogue at a pace of speaking that is frighteningly close to the real world, and I am amazed to discover that what didn’t sound at all like a language made up of distinct words two weeks ago is already comprehensible. I have explained to Bernice that, when we do next get to Portugal, we are going to go into a café and, when I ask her what she wants to drink, she had better say ‘Mineral water’, since that is the only thing I know how to order.
Of course, I cannot escape the niggling fear that, when we do get back to Portugal, I will discover that the Portuguese I am hearing bears as close a relation to the Penamacorean dialect as Received Pronunciation does to Geordie (or, if you prefer, as close a relation as Standard American English does to Appalachian mountain talk).
Joe’s second contribution was to remind me of a book I hadn’t thought about in a long time: English As She Is Spoke. In 1855, an enterprising Portuguese named Pedro Carolino had the smart idea of taking a previously published Portuguese-French phrasebook, and adapting it for Portuguese visitors to England, by translating the French phrases into English. At this point, at least two questions spring to mind. The second of these is: Why didn’t he translate the Portuguese directly into English, and cut out the French middle man? Hold that thought, while I ask the first question? Why did a man who had absolutely no knowledge of English think he was qualified to compile a Portuguese-English phrase book in the first place? I suspect he felt that there was a demand that was not being satisfied, and that this represented too good a business opportunity to miss. With regard to the second question (the one I asked first), I suspect there were no Portuguese-English dictionaries available, so he took what he could find, which was a French-English dictionary. In any event, this was a fortunate day for the world of letters, because the end result of Carolino’s labours was a book of which Mark Twain wrote: ‘Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.’ The gloriousness of the mistranslations cannot be described. Let me, instead, give you a couple of examples from the double-page spread that Joe sent me a photocopy of.
In response to a question about whether the road is safe to travel along:
It have nothing to fear, not in day neither the night.
Small-talk to one’s carriage companion:
Let us take patience. Still some o’clock and we shall be in the end of our voyage.
The post-publication story of the book is also interesting. In the years following its publication, initially in Paris, it went the mid-19th Century equivalent of viral in social media. Copies were passed from hand to hand among London society, for native English-speakers to marvel at its butchery of the language. It was eventually published in London and Boston 28 years later, as an entertainment. In 1969, it was republished, again purely for its entertainment value, and a revised paperback version was published in 2004, 149 years after its original publication. One can’t help reflecting that if it had not been such a glorious failure, it would never have been such a resounding success.
Indeed, it features in a favourite book of mine that celebrates such triumphant disasters of the human spirit: Stephen Pile’s The Book of Heroic Failures. Pile comments:
Is there anything in conventional English which could equal the vividness of ‘to craunch the marmoset’?”
This is an entry under the book’s Idiotisms and Proverbs, and represents the author’s attempt to translate the French slang idiomatic expression croquer le marmot, used to indicate waiting patiently for someone to open a door, with croquer referring to the knocking or rapping sound, and marmot, a term for the grotesque door knockers in vogue at the time.
And now, I think it’s time to give you Chapter 2 of the Tax Authority saga. I left you two weeks ago waiting for the arrival at our UK contact address of a letter containing the new password enabling me to go online in the hope of being able to verify that the payment made by Micha’el by bank transfer on our behalf had been correctly identified. (If you’re lost, and care enough, you can reread the post from two weeks ago.) A few days ago, the letter arrived, my contact read out the password to me, I went online, remembered that my favourite film is, apparently, Citizen Kane, and keyed in the password – a string of 12 letters.
Not accepted.
‘Aha!’, I thought, ‘I wonder if it is not upper-case, as I assumed, but lower-case.’ Keyed it in.
Not accepted. Followed by the dreaded: You have two more attempts.
Curses, I thought, or, actually, %&*&##@!!. (I never knew that a string of meaningless symbols substituted for a curse is called a grawlix, until today. This is now a word I will treasure, like aglet, which is that little plastic tube clamped onto the end of a shoelace to prevent fraying – as if you didn’t know.) Keeping calm as I breathed into a paper bag, I called my UK contact, to ask whether the password was upper-, lower- or mixed-case.
‘Upper-case. Couldn’t you tell I was reading it in my upper-case voice?’
‘Your voice always sounds upper-case to me.’
Back to the site, hoping that I had simply mis-keyed the password originally. Tapping out, letter by letter, cross-checking after each letter. Pressing Next. Waiting. Oh,that endless, gut-wrenching wait.
Success!
Of course, every success is only really the opening up of another opportunity for failure. I had now unlocked a website that stretched out before me like Hampton Court maze, except for the fact that it had no helpful hedge to keep on my left….or is it right?. Anyway, in an hour of stumbling through the pages I found my message board, with a very nice message reminding me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax, and a personal data page, where I was able to enter my email address and nominate it as my preferred means of communication. This produced an almost instantaneous result, in the form of an email notifying me that I had until 31 May to pay my tax.
At this point, I admitted defeat, sent all of the details to Micha’el, phoned him on WhatsApp and asked him to please call the authorities to ensure that they can locate and correctly assign the payment. For further developments, watch this space.
And finally, after last week’s photos of a chainsaw, I passed on to the kids a comment from a friend that: In Tennessee, most hillbillies wait until their kid is two before giving him serious tools. I’m pleased to see that they are taking this advice seriously.
This week’s post has been brought to you by the words idiotism, grawlix and aglet. Thanks, respectively, to Joe, Norma and Andrea B (and pleased not to disappoint you, Andrea S.)