I just watched Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert again; every time I see it I find new things in it, and this time I scooped up plenty of Hattic material. As it happens, the movie itself is available on YouTube (for the moment) and the published screenplay is at Internet Archive; in what follows I will provide [minute:second] timings and follow each line in Spanish with the translations in the subtitles and then the screenplay.
The first bit that made me think “I’ll have to post this” comes shortly after Simon heals the man whose hands had been severed (and who immediately uses them to slap his daughter for asking questions):
Con estas entelequias nos hemos entretenido demasiado. [8:17]
We’ve spent long enough on these spiritual shenanigans.
We have spent too much time on these revelations.
The Spanish usage made me quiver with delight, because entelequia is one of those words whose literal definition — in this case, entelechy — is so recherché it’s known to almost nobody, but which in Spanish has developed the colloquial sense (per my trusty Harper Collins dictionary) ‘pipe dream, pie in the sky’; both the movie translations are inadequate, but at least “spiritual shenanigans” shows some awareness of the meaning, while “revelations” sounds like sheer guesswork.
Much later, Simon is delivering a sermon from his pillar, and he says:
No cedamos en la ascesis, tendámosla como un arco. [20:35]
Let us not yield in our asceticism. Let us spread it like an arc.
We shall not rest from our sacrifice. We shall span it like a bridge
Both translations have completely misunderstood the word arco; “tendámosla como un arco” means ‘let us draw it like a bow.’
Immediately after that, Brother Trifón, a monk possessed by the devil, starts spewing blasphemies; at one point he curses Christ “y su madre putativa.” [24:21] I don’t think I’d realized before that this is a pun on “y su puta madre” ‘and his whore of a mother’; the subtitler renders it literally as “and his so-called mother,” while the screenplay ignores the pun and has “and his whore of a mother.” Trifón then goes into a hilarious rant in which his blasphemies get more and more recondite, and the monks have increasing trouble figuring out how to respond:
[Trifón] ¡Abajo el sagrado hipóstasis!
Down with the sacred hypostasis!
Down with the holy hypostasis![Monks] ¡Viva el sagrado hipóstasis!
Long live the sacred hypostasis!
Up with the holy hypostasis!¡Muera anástasis!
Death to the anastasis!
Down with the anastasis!¡Viva!
Long may it live!
Up with…?¡Viva el apocatástasis!
Long live the apocatastasis!
Up with the apocatastasis!¡Muera!
Down with it!
Down with …!
(I should point out that anástasis is not a Spanish word — at least it’s in no dictionary I have access too, even the Real Academia’s [“La palabra «anástasis» no está en el Diccionario”] — and hypostasis is one of those recherché words that’s developed a colloquial sense, this time in Russian, which I wrote about here.) At this point, one monk turns to the other and mutters “¿Qué es eso del apocatástasis?” [24:32-44]. The subtitle has the straightforward “What on earth is the apocatastasis?” but the screenplay throws up its hands and renders it “This devil knows more theology than we do!” As for the very obscure word apocatastasis, I had occasion to mention it in this post (though for some reason I spelled it apokatastasis).
After Simon has expelled the devil from Trifón, the elder monk says (I am transcribing the Spanish as I hear it):
Luego, en la mándara, terminaré yo de exorcisarla a mi manera. [25:16]
I’ll finish exorcising him at the monastery in my own way.
Then, when we return to the monastery, I will complete the exorcism… in my own way.
I presume “monastery” is correct, since both versions use it, but what on earth is the Spanish word? My “mándara” isn’t a word, but that’s what it sounds like to me after repeated listenings. Any help will be deeply appreciated.
I dug around a bit and all I could find for mándara was an Egyptian Arabic word meaning ‘entry hall’ or ‘receiving room’ or such. Does that make any sense in context?
It’s a monk talking about a monastery — your guess is as good as mine! But since it is putatively set in Syria, I guess an Arabic word would be plausible.
Medieval Latin mandra (from μάνδρα) means ‘sheepfold’ and ‘monastery’. (Scroll to the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (DMLBS) under mandra here, for example.) Note also in the DRAE mandra.
Mandra is from the greek:
La pronunciación griega, mandra, significa redil de ovejas. Luego los monjes utilizaron esta palabra para referirse al lugar donde solían reunirse.
https://www.orthodoxonline.org/theology/es/church-history/church-history-to-nineteenth-century/monks-in-the-third-and-fourth-centuries/
I suppose Trifon is an Orthodox monk, or maybe the word applied more generally.
EDIT: Ninja’d by others
That must be the source for the Egyptian word, too.
Medieval Latin mandra (from μάνδρα) means ‘sheepfold’ and ‘monastery’.
Wow, you’ve come through again! Thanks very much.
I’d heard of the sheepfold meaning before, but never monastery.
the source for the Egyptian word
Arabic منظرة manẓara ‘place from which to observe a scenic view; scenic view, landscape; watchtower; reception room, entrance hall’ is a noun of place on the regular pattern mafʿala from the root of نظر naẓara ‘see, look’. Lane in his Arabic dictionary has the following note on manẓara:
That works, but how come the initial stress (e.g. here, here)? I would have expected the stress to fall on the second syllable. Cf. [mækˈtæbæ], here.
The google books ngram viewer confirms my vague impression/assumption that “quiver with delight” is notably rarer than “shiver with delight.” But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong, of course …
Possibly because the original Greek, and the WikiP page, use a “k”. The Catholic New Advent Encyclopedia uses a “c”.
It’s a bit ironic that a putative devil is promoting apokatastasis, since that means the putative devil can/will eventually repent.
Contra Owlmirror, the original Greek most certainly did not spell the word with a k, it spelled it with a κ. There are rival conventions as to how to transliterate Greek into our alphabet, one of which generally renders κ’s as c’s and the other of which generally renders κ’s as k’s. The number of Greek-etymology words in English that have rival variant spellings for this specific reasons seems likely to be in the thousands, and there’s no obvious solution since it’s not like one convention is inherently better than the other yet both have created plenty of facts-on-the-ground that are difficult for the other to dislodge.
There are of course some words where the c-variant has been so well-established for so long that the k-variant has never really gotten off the ground. It looks like “katalysis” for “catalysis” is quite rare, for example, and “apokalypse” for “apocalypse” is so rare in English texts that the hits for it in the google books corpus are generally in texts which turn out to be written in German.
The history of English archimandrite will also take you to the Greek word in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimandrite
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/archimandrite
The best short story on the subject, The Archimandrite’s Niece.
there’s no obvious solution—the obvious solution is for the British to use c, the Americans to use k, and the Canadians to alternate with each change of prime minister
o kanade! (as we say af yidish)
Re mandar from Corriente’s “A Dictionary of Andalusi Arabic” (Brill 1997), p. 532, under the entry for NḌR:
Note the pattern here is maCCaC with the stress on the first syllable.
Brother Trifón’s pun is simply whorrible…
The fictional archimandrite in the Doctor Who story “The Androids of Tara” has a fabulously over-the-top hat. It’s part of the overall intentional silliness of the story. “The Androids of Tara” was supposed to be a light pastiche of The Prisoner of Zenda, positioned as the fifth serial of the season-long Key to Time arc, before the much darker finale.* However, because the guy who was supposed to write the fourth serial had a nervous breakdown, “The Adroids of Tara” was shifted to the fourth position.**
* When I watched the sixth serial, “The Armageddon Factor,” with my sons, the younger one, Ben, made the common meme joke: “Mabe the real Key to Time was the friends we made along the way.” I, who had seen the story before, and James, who had figured out enough of the plot, laughed so hard that we had to pause, then back up, the DVD. At the time, Ben was mystified, but if you know the story, you know why what he said was so funny.
** The chaotic reshuffling also meant that what actually became the fifth serial, “The Power of Kroll,” had some serious issues. They grabbed a former Doctor Who script editor, who had already written the first story of the season, to pen a new story in a hurry, and the preproduction was also very rushed. There were issues with effects shots and episode lengths, as well as with casting. Two major roles went to people the show already employed (as the stunt coordinator and the voice of K-9), and one actor found out he was playing a different role from the one he thought he had accepted.
On “madre putativa”, while it’s certainly true that there’s a riff on “tu puta madre” (your whore-mother, aka sonofabitch, inversely) as commented by Mr. Hat, I believe there’s another thing going on too. Saint Joseph is referred to as the “padre putativo” of the Saviour (surely no need to explain why, here). Indeed, the perhaps-mysterious diminutive of José, Pepe, is sometimes explained (I’ve never been sure how seriously, or not, but my Spanish is L2) as coming from PP, or Padre Putativo.
So it’s a sort of double pun, or wordplay. Well done Buñuel!
(Interesting to see the word putative, twice already, in the comments!)
The Spanish were not traditionally Protestants so the P.P. that is supposed to account for “Pepe” woulda coulda shoulda been the more ecclesiastical Pater Putativus. Which does appear to have been a real Latin phrase – one character in Ovid is apparently referred to as “pater putativus Phaethontis et rex Ethiopae.” Luke 3:23 in the Vulgate refers to Jesus as “ut putabatur, filius Joseph” (in the KJV “being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph”).
J.W.,
for a Christian use of the phrase “pater putativus”, see e.g. Wycliff’s “De Perfectione Statuum”, chap. II (ed. Buddensieg, vol. II, London 1883, p. 458):
Interestingly, the Czech diminutive for Josef/Jozef is “Pepa”. The usual explanation is that this is a derivation of Giuseppe > Beppe.
Indeed, the perhaps-mysterious diminutive of José, Pepe, is sometimes explained (I’ve never been sure how seriously, or not, but my Spanish is L2) as coming from PP, or Padre Putativo.
The person I heard that from believed it, but as Hatters know, you can find people to believe any bogus etymology. (I’ve also been told seriously that bruja is from broche.)
the Czech diminutive for Josef/Jozef is “Pepa”
…and the most widespread Austrian nicknames for Josef/Joseph are “Sepp”, “Seppi” and “Peppi”. Children learning to talk tend to learn [f] rather late.
On learning [f] relatively late: I knew a boy of about two who said “dire” for “fire”, and seemed to know that there was a letter he couldn’t say, since he sang the alphabet song as “A B C D, L M N O P, Q, X, Y, and Z”.
Oh, that’s a few years later than usual. At that stage, only [ ʃ ] is sometimes still missing in the (…two…) languages I have any experience with.
Do German kids ever have difficulties pronouncing r (e.g., replacing with Eng. w) or initial st (replacing with t)? These are ones I have seen in English.
Do German children usually learn to speak aged 0? (Or possibly -1)
Oh. When do children learn alphabet songs in English? Over here it remains common to arrive in school (not even kindergarten!) illiterate at age 6 except for your name in all-caps or so. In the US at least, rudimentary reading at 3 seems to be common…
Replacement of [ʀ] by [x] is not unheard of, but not at age 6. Typologically unusual consonant clusters are acquired earlier still.
I said the boy was about two. His lack of [f] didn’t seem unusual for his age; Google found some reviews of child consonant acquisition in English indicating that typically “/b, n, m, p, h, w, d/ were acquired by 2;0–2;11; /ɡ, k, f, t, ŋ, j/ were acquired by 3;0–3;11;”, and others later.
I think they usually learn them ‘by ear’ – from videos, these days. My littlest cousin could definitely sing the alphabet (more or less) when she was still two, although she has very little idea what letters are.
ktschwarz said ‘about two’, hence my confusion at your ‘few years’. Although I was just being silly really!
My favourite obscure Spanish word is escatología, favourite because its cognates in English are about as different in meaning as two words can be, eschatology and scatology, though in both cases the conversion to Spanish exactly follows the usual conventions.
I’m a little surprised Buñuel didn’t work that into the scene, now that you mention it.