The following blurb arrives in my in-box:

"Flamenco Festival USA llega a su cuarta edición:

Sara Baras, José Mercé, Paco de Lucía, Jose Antonio, Manuela Carrasco, Chocolate, Israel Galván, Juan de Juan, Cia. Andaluza de Danza, María Pagés y Farruquito, serán los platos fuertes del festival.

Del 29 de enero al 28 de Febrero de 2004, Flamenco Festival recorrerá los Estados Unidos (Nueva York, Boston, Chicago, Whasington DC, Hartford, Cleveland, Miami) para saltar después a Londres."

So here I am, plugging it. If you happen to live in any of these places - especially "Whasington DC" - be sure to get tickets and go. I saw Farruquito's current show "Alma vieja" in Madrid a few days ago, and it was as good as the press have been saying. Flamenco for purists, with style and substance working together in a show dedicated to the kind of flamenco his grandfather created. Further info on the fabulous Farruquito forthwith.

And still on a travelling theme: The Times reports (Nov. 27th):

"Spain, with 12.5 million British visitors, has toppled France, with 12.1 million, as the top destination for Britons for the first time, followed by Ireland, the United States and Greece. Holidays accounted for more than 91 per cent of visits to Spain, compared to 63 per cent of those to France, where many visitors are day-trippers on shopping outings."

So there's another reason for learning to speak Spanish...

And, of course, there's always grief.
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...when, during the preliminaries to the Australia/Spain final of the Davis Cup in Melbourne, Australia yesterday, the Spanish national anthem was played. Because it was not the Spanish national anthem at all which they were hearing, but the stirring "Himno del Riego", the anthem of the Second Republic - a tune which has not in fact been the Spanish national anthem since 1939. A full enquiry has been requested. The harrowing events, as recounted by the trumpeter responsible, James Morrison, are here. Rumors are rife that when the cup takes place in Spain, a vengeful version of "Waltzing Matilda" will ring out.
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En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo mas vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lentejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall, there lived not so long ago one of those gentlemen who always have a lance in the rack, an ancient buckler, a skinny nag, and a greyhound for the chase. A stew with more beef than mutton in it, chopped meat for his evening meal, scraps for a Saturday, lentils on Friday, and a young pigeon as a special delicacy for Sunday, went to account for three-quarters of his income. (trans. Samuel Putnam, 1949)

At a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to remember, there lived a little while ago one of those gentlemen who are wont to keep a lance in the rack, an old buckler, a lean horse, and a swift greyhound. His stew had more beef than mutton in it and most nights he ate a hodge-podge, pickled and cold. Lentil soup on Fridays, "tripe and trouble" on Saturdays, and an occasional pigeon as an extra delicacy on Sundays consumed three-quarters of his income. (trans. Walter Starkie, 1964)

In a village in La Mancha, the name of which I cannot quite recall, there lived not long ago one of those country gentleman or hidalgos who keep a lance in a rack, an ancient leather shield, a scrawny hack and a greyhound for coursing. A midday stew with rather more shin of beef than leg of lamb, the leftovers for supper most nights, lardy eggs on Saturdays, lentil broth on Fridays and an occasional pigeon as a Sunday treat ate up three-quarters of his income. (trans. John Rutherford, 2001)

Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a nobleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and abstinence on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, sometimes squab as a treat on Sundays — these consumed three-fourths of his income. (trans. Edith Grossman, 2003)

Five different ways of starting Don Quixote… and there are plenty of others out there. Which you do prefer, and why? The recent (apparently reader-friendly) translation by Edith Grossman of Don Quixote, which I plan to get hold of soon, has provoked an interesting debate on translation methodologies at Open Brackets. For those who like this kind of thing, which I do and you may, There are further DQ discussions at Translation - What Difference Does It Make? and Comparing Translations of
Don Quixote de la Mancha. Just out of interest, has anyone ever sampled "tripe and trouble" (Starkie)?
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How to translate telebasura? "Teletrash"? Anyway, there's a lot of it about wherever you live, and Puerta del Sol host Iñaki Gabilondo and his early morning rival on the Spanish airwaves, Luis del Olmo, came together a few days ago to condemn it and to claim that quality and profitability are not incompatible. Del Olmo apparently quoted Juan Luis Cebrián's opinion that telebasura is as dangerous as terrorism or drugs. There's an interesting article on loosely the same theme - not in Spain, but in the UK - here. Basura, by the way, derives from the same Latin root as barrer, to sweep. They'd never tell you that on Gran Hermano.

Meanwhile, Variety reports from the first Sahara International Film Festival that the first prize was won by the Spanish animated feature "The Living Forest". The jury was made up of representatives of Saharan refugee camps. The festival took place in the Sahara Arab Democratic Republic, a former Spanish colony in the western part of the Sahara Desert, and it has been seen as a statement of autonomy from its ruler of almost 30 years, Morocco. The musical "The Other Side of the Bed", which was one of the big hits of 2002 in Spain was, Variety reports, "a literal show-stopper. The ebullient bed scenes caused a frisson among the open air audience, which included women and children, and the film was halted."
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Number of people who have died in traffic accidents in Spain in the past 24 years: 135,761
Number of people who have died in traffic accidents in Spain in the past five years: 28,335
Number of people injured in traffic accidents in Spain in the past five years: 758,903
Percentage of drivers over legal drink-driving limit in fatal traffic accidents: 40
Number of Spanish driving licences permanently revoked in the past five years: 13
Number of Spanish driving licences permanently revoked in 2002: 0
(Statistics from El País, 24th November 2003)

And on a related theme:

Number of bouquets left outside Kensington Palace this year on the sixth anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales: 4
(Statistic from The Independent, 9th November 2003)

And on a completely unrelated theme:

Number of readers of most blogs, according to John C. Dvorak, quoting a Perseus survey: 12

Hmmm...
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Tim Gambrill has been a regular commentator on PdS Blog since its inception. I'd just like to take this opportunity to link to his usefully clear Spanish Grammar site - great for clearing up linguistic doubts. If for nothing else, the site should be praised for getting the explanation of the ser/estar distinction down to a mere fifty words.
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In Spain, the perception among young people (and many of their parents) is very much that another language (generally English) is a useful, even necessary, life tool. But a Guardian article, emerging from the Language Trends 2003 report, confirms old Brit stereotypes about attitudes to languages and makes disheartening reading for the kind of person who might be reading (and writing) this blog. The report states that three-quarters of UK universities have axed some language courses over the past three years; “disappearing languages” include French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish and Arabic. With them, of course, disappears much else, most of it statistically unquantifiable, non-vocational, and therefore deemed by students and those who “teach” them to be of little importance. And it’s probably true that you can lead a successful life without being able to speak any other language than English. Perhaps the fact that there’s so little interest in other languages has something to do with the way they’re being taught. Perhaps this is another aspect of globalization in action; but I can’t see what benefits not exposing people to other languages and cultures could possibly have. Incidentally – and it is incidentally – the Spanish language seems to be bucking the trend. The Guardian reports that in schools, many of which have made languages optional at age 14, there has been a “small rise” in the study of Spanish.
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While the rest of the world was watching the Spanish soccer team struggle to victory over Norway, I was at Madrid’s Cines Verdi (the best place in the city, apart from the Filmoteca Española, for seeing offbeat fare) together with about ten other people, watching the kinds of film you don’t get to see unless you look out for them. One of them was by Helena Taberna, and is called Extranjeras. It simply weaves together interviews with immigrant women in Madrid - women from many different countries, at different levels of victimhood - into a valuable, thought-provoking 75 minutes. It revealed to me some aspects of the city of which I’m woefully ignorant – the Ecuadorian section in the Retiro Park, for example, the many Poles who live in Aluche and Alcalá de Henares, or the multicultural cookery sessions which take place in the suburb of Alcobendas and which look like fun. Memorable moments include the Moroccan schoolgirl who smiles about having to put up with comments like “there goes Bin Laden’s daughter” and the Rumanian Muslim woman who lives in Madrid and is married to an Egyptian. You want multicultural? We got multicultural. And Madrid’s becoming more so by the minute. How long before the city has its own proper Chinatown? Though perhaps Extranjeras casts its net too wide and so touches no real depths.

The other film I saw was a real curiosity which I’ll write about later. Incidentally, if you’re in Madrid, then Cines Verdi has come up with the valuable idea of dedicating one night a month to showing a good film which you might have missed first time around, because it ran for so little time (having to make way for Matrix Reheated or whatever). Film screenings will be followed by round table debates.
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I promise this is the last time I’ll mention the royal wedding between Felipe and Letizia Ortiz, but since I haven’t written about my team Atlético for a while (they haven’t deserved it), I just had to mention the banner which was waving at the Vicente Calderón stadium on Sunday as they achieved their fifth victory in a row, against Villareal, and went fifth in the league. (Which feels wrong, somehow.) The banner said: “El Príncipe también quiere a Leti”. I’m not going to destroy this by explaining it. All you need to know is that Atlético are affectionately referred to as “Atleti”.
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The problems of regionalism and language in Spain are clearly expressed by this letter, written for PdS Blog by my sister-in-law, Chiqui Zalamea. It shows how children are effectively and unforgivably being used as pawns in an ideological – and absurd, when pushed to these extremes - game of chess. Parents are thus being forced to act against their beliefs.

“We live in Valencia, a city that belongs to a community of slightly more than four million inhabitants, where Castilian is spoken as the first language, and in some areas they speak a language very similar to Catalan, Valencian [the debate rages on, incidentally, about whether the two are actually separate languages or not]. Years ago, during the Franco dictatorship, Valencian was a persecuted language, and as a result, the most important thing about it was lost, its passage from one generation to the next. Now they are trying to make Valencian take root in a manner as forced as it is absurd.

“We have a daughter of six years old. She spent the early years of her primary education in a public school, in the Valencian capital. At first, we were asked to choose which of the two languages we wanted her to be educated in: Valencian or Castilian. If we chose Valencian, then she'd learn just this one language. If we chose Castilian, then classes would alternate between the two languages. We accepted this. The problem arises when our daughter begins her second educational cycle. Again we have two options; the first is that her education will be exclusively in Valencian, apart from one hour a week of a subject called “Castilian”. The second option is called P.I.L., a program of linguistic immersion in Valencian, where in the first course the classes are 50% in the two languages, after which the number of classes in Valencian progressively increases each course until the classes in Castilian disappear, remaining only as a once-a-week subject. To our total astonishment, until our daughter is eight, she will not study any foreign-language subjects.

“So against our principles, our daughter has had to leave to go to a private school, to be able to study in her language, Castilian - one of the world’s richest languages - and to be able to start studying a foreign language earlier (she already knows Valencian). The way the political administration here promotes regional isolation is incredible, when every day the area receives hundreds of immigrants, and our children will one day have to be relate to and to coexist with children from all over the world. To do so in a language that only a few people use will be very hard.”
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The Prince of Asturias gave the future Princess Letizia jewels and a necklace; she gave him cufflinks and a book. “Es un libro muy bonito,” she told the watching millions, "de 1850, de Mariano José de Larra”. The book in question is an antique edition of Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (The Pageboy of Don Enrique the Sorrowful). It's the only novel by the great Spanish satirist (written under the pseudonym Fígaro), who is best-known for his acid portraits of 19th-century Spanish society. To have been given a book by Larra as a wedding gift must be giving the prince food for thought, since the Romantic Larra was famously unlucky in romance. He fell for a woman who later turned out to be his father’s lover; his marriage was a disaster; and he committed suicide, after a failed adulterous affair, at the age of 28. There is further reflection for thought for the future king in the famous sentence from the novel "El que no ha tenido un perro, no sabe lo que es querer y ser querido" ("Who ever has not had a dog doesn’t know what it is to love and be loved"). But when was the last time a royal bride-to-be gave her future husband a book? Letizia is a great reader, and has said that she could only marry a man who reads – so is it not conceivable, as a new role model, that she might even help to make reading books – ulp – fashionable again in Spain? Oh, all right then. No, it isn't. But Larra, at least, will probably be selling a few more copies than his publishers would ever have thought possible.

While I'm here: thanks to Jenny at Mulbinba Moments for her recommendation of a Sydney Morning Herald article about learning Spanish. Nobly, I'll publish the link to it, even though it signally fails to mention the rather fine audiomagazine I edit.
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Did you read it here first in English? Spain's Prince Felipe, the nation's most eligible bachelor by a mile, is going to marry, at long last. The lucky woman is a TV newsreader whom I might have thought about marrying myself, if I'd been a prince. She is the fabulous Letizia Ortiz. Another scoop for PdS Blog. And being a scoop, let's just wait and see whether it happens to be true as well...
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