Yesterday in town it was remarked on the benefits to allkind that would accrue from exchanging our customary diet of Big Macs for one of roadkill and Fucking pigeon (what’s the Latin?). Celtiberians consulted state that their race does not partake of the pigeon, and Juan Bautista Carrasco’s Mitología universal (1864) suggests that this may [...]

Ulysses: “I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube from one woman to another.” Junius Henri Browne wrote in 1873 that he “gained a much worse reputation [in the US] for licentious stories than he deserved, from the spurious and prurient rubbish that used to be put off on the [...]

RAE 2.0 is a cool little gadget if you’re sick of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española’s clunky interface: append the word you’re after to the URL and http://rae2.es/abracadabra or http://rae2.es/abraxas or whatever. (Via JPQ)

I continue to think “mystifications” is a better translation than “hoaxes” of mixtificaciones. Gerald Howson in The flamencos of Cadiz Bay writes of a 1950s carnaval pregonero preaching against the use of “mixtifications, modernisms and orfeonic banalities” in carnival songs. He wouldn’t have liked Silvester Paradox either.

This fragment from Pío Baroja’s memoir, Desde la última vuelta del camino, reminded me of much contemporary Barcelona graffiti:
As we approach Reinosa the fog begins to clear and we see the lights of the village shining.
I awake in the morning and lean over the hotel balcony. A gray day; foggy and cold, in the mountain [...]

This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is [...]

It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860):
M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal medicines [...]

MJ suggests that “adventures, devices and hoaxes” is a better translation of “aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones” than “adventures, inventions and mystifications.” I think that’s a bit hard on C19th Spain’s greatest scientist ;o)

Re shepherds, Pío Baroja says that in the Navarre village inhabited by Silvester Paradox, hero of The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox (Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox, 1901) that the local guardians of public order were called ministers (ministros). (Silvestre Paradox is very strange and very funny. It’s a disgrace that [...]

Towards the end of La colmena (The hive), Cela’s portrait of a post-war Madrid devoid of heroes and on the brink of oblivion,
The morning ascends, little by little, climbing like a worm through the hearts of the men and the women of the city.
This reminds me of the episode in Pío Baroja’s morbid Santa Teresa [...]

Quake and quiver, countryfolk, for Sicilian gentlemen will shortly be beating Berkshire’s bushy byways for the Great British Truffle Harvest of 2004; the principal threats to Catalonia’s black diamonds, on the other hand, are Alzheimer’s–forests seem very big when you’re with an 85-year old who can’t remember where the buggers are–and wild boar.
Wild boar are [...]

The sardana was encouraged by the Francoist state and suffered its greatest difficulties during the period of revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist and Stalinist control