Can anyone help me with the words and/or a translation of the Spanish (spoken) section of “The Skeletons of Quinto” from the soundtrack to “A Mighty Wind?”
The official lyrics site just says “Spanish” but doesn’t give the words or the translation.
Googling, I found one allusion to this, where the guy says it’s very funny, but won’t spoil it (!) by setting it down. Ow!
(Part of the humor is that it’s a Central American Workers’ Rights Protest Song – with the spoken part in proper formal “Castillian” Spanish, lisp and all.)
(I believe I have asked this before here, and gotten no joy. Apologies for the topic rebounce, and thank you to anyone who can help.)
I could only recognize a couple of words from the Spanish part, but googling them got me to this site, which gives these lyrics [sic]:
Un Oceano de verguenza incita nuestros recuerdos las estranguladas
Pesadillas de muerte me estremecen hasta los huesos
Y los esqueleetos de Quinto me llaman a mi morada
…which they translate as:
An ocean of shame strangles our memories
Nightmares of death chill me to the bone
And the skeletons of Quinto call me home
I’m not sure about the translation of line 1. (After all, I’m an expert. I took AP Spanish 27 years ago.) Incita = third-person singular “incites” and las estranguladas = “the strangled [things of feminine grammatical gender],” but I don’t see how to turn it into the given translation. The rest of it looks good enough.
Trying to speak those lyrics to the actual performance of the song is a challenge.
Thank you! You have a good ear and better Google-fu than I do (which, alas, ain’t sayin’ much.) It’s such a cute song, a very dry parody of the genre, and I’d just been curious as blazes ever since I heard it. You’re my hero!
(ALL of the songs on the soundtrack have something “wrong” with them. The Sea-Chanty, for instance, uses pseudo-nautical terms remarkably wrongly. “The furbelow of the mighty whale.” Nuh-uh! But it’s FUNNY!)
Mi Espanol es pocito…y mal… But it does seem to be quite pretty poetry. The song, as a song, is nice enough. It embodies a few cliches…but that’s the humor of it.
(corrected the spelling some, in case anybody wants to look stuff up or whatever, and added count of syllables)
An ocean of shame triggers our memories the strangled
death nightmares shake me to the bone
and the skeletons of Quinto call me home
is what I get.
It’s verso libre, free verse, so since I don’t know the context the only reason I see to split it that way is to rhyme estranguladas with morada (rima asonante, vowels only).
Both of those phrasings would be “nightmares about death”. Depending on the writer’s level of Spanish they can also be “nightmares so bad you want to die to escape them”, but that’s more difficult to fit.
True, by saying “pesadillas de muerte” without a definite article, it can mean nightmares of death or deathly nightmares or variations thereof.
Right - as in most of the soundtrack it mocks some of the clichés of the 1960s Folk Era, in this case the sometimes awkward adaptation of foreign themes (because, solidarity with the workers of the world and stuff…).
But it has a definite article, the full subject is
las estranguladas pesadillas de muerte
what it doesn’t have is a second definite article which would make that death be Death, and then a native speaker might anyway have chosen the more poetic parca… (lit. “the thin one”). And even with that second article, it would be confusing: are they now nightmares about the dreamer’s own death, about a skeletong carrying a scythe (might be a Bosch paintings overdose, try switching to Baroque sculpture for a while), or is Death herself the dreamer?
I probably should apologize or something, but between the headcold and lack of sleep, this is like being 15 again and going point by point on the subject of “Quevedo vs Góngora” aka “Quevedo was a bastard* but Góngora was an overwrought jerkwad” (my class was firmly on the Quevedo side; even the teacher admitted he couldn’t stand Góngora’s poetry).
Proving once more that perfectly decent mothers can produce whoresons.
Oh, and Trinopus? Please search the boards for seseo, and pocito is a little well (noun, not adverb).
I’ve been using “pocito” for years now, and all my Spanish-speaking encounters have understood it perfectly. If it’s idiomatically wrong…that’s even perfecter!
JRDelirious: AHA! Thank you! I had the right word, just the wrong spelling. I had thought it went “poco > pocito.” Apparently not! “Poco > poquito.” Keen.
Anyway, I usually say it aloud – and Spanish speakers usually grin in a friendly fashion, because I’ve made at least that much of a token effort.
(Then there was the day my cow-orker wanted to know how to say “American” in Spanish. We told him it was “Maricon.” And he went around all day saying “Soy muy grande Maricon.” We had pity, though, and told him what it really meant before he could say it somewhere that might get him punched in the nose.)
It’s pretty standard for C to change to QU in spanish to maintain the consonant sound. As an example, most conjugations of tocar use a C but when the following vowel is an E, it changes to qu.
It’s part of the whole syllabic thing, the phonetic correspondence goes at the syllable level rather than the single-phoneme level. For some consonants, syllables containing the three “strong” vowels a, o, u are spelled different from those with the two “weak” vowels e, i (“strong” and “weak” are what we call them, at least at the school level).
/k/ => ca, que, qui, co, cu (qu is a digraph, the u is “not pronounced”). This sound may also be written k when the word is Greek in origin, creatively spelled or otherwise “exotic”. A feature of semesero (Spanish textspeak) is writing k for qu.
/θ/ (becomes /s/ in seseo) => za, ce, ci, zo, zu
/s/ (becomes /θ/ in ceceo) => sa, se, si, so, su
If the syllables have additional letters behind those, the first consonant is still defined by the vowel: zumba (/θum.ba/ or /sum.ba/), cumbia (/kum.bia/).
That very often when people talk about which languages are easy or difficult to spell, they are thinking in terms of “one sound, one letter”, but in Spanish that works at the syllable level, not the single-phoneme level.
Some consonant sounds, such as /m/ or /n/, are always represented the same way.
Other, such as /k/, /g/, /x/ or /θ/, will get represented differently depending on what the following vowel is (and, for some of them, depending on the origin of the word - but if something has a non-standard-rule spelling, the standard-rule one is also valid, such as quilo and kilo).
The slashes // mean that what’s in between is IPA symbols or at least trying to approximate them (very often people do not separate syllables or indicate stress, only the phonemes themselves).
And I understand SQL
