Joy of Spanish
Como agua para chocolate
When we hit a streak of bad luck and things just don’t seem to go our way, we say in English “When it rains, it pours.” Maybe you’re on your way to work, for example, and all of a sudden you feel pain in your lower abdomen. “Uh-oh,” you say to yourself. “This isn’t good.” So you decide to take a detour to the emergency room at the nearest hospital, but then you hear a strange clanking coming from under your car. “I don’t believe it.” You’ve got this tremendous pain, which could be your appendix about to rupture, and your car is losing speed and backfiring. Just when you think you’ve got the car under control and working properly, you hear a small explosion and the car swerves: you’ve got a flat. And then you see the red and blue lights flashing from behind and you think you’re going to be rescued, but then it dawns on you that you forgot your license inside your wallet which you left on the dresser… This is a “when it rains, it pours” situation.
There are two different phrases in Spanish that refer to this sort of thing. The first is no es lo duro sino lo tupido, which when translated literally would read something like “It’s not how tough it is but how thick it is.” In another words, one takes for granted that setbacks are by nature difficult to deal with; the problem isn’t the problem but the sheer number of problems. If someone throws a knife at us, we can probably step out of the way, but if they throw one after another, sooner or later we’re going to get stuck: no es lo duro sino lo tupido.
The second phrase, llover sobre mojado, has two complementary meanings. Literally taken, it can be understood as “to rain on what is already wet.” When rain falls on a dry surface, the surface gets wet. If it’s already wet and it rains again, it just gets wetter, certainly not drier: there’s definitely no change for the better. So this is why llover sobre mojado can be understood in two different, albeit parallel, ways. One is close to no es lo duro sino lo tupido in the sense that when one bad thing after another happens, it’s lloviendo sobre mojado. If something bad happens, and then another bad thing happens, and then another…, it’s like one storm after another: “When it rains, it pours.” The other way of understanding the phrase has to do with the banality of it all. If something is plain for all to see, if everyone already understands a situation and why it is the way it is, there is no need for somebody to stand up and explain it. So if Joe Shmoe does just that, he is said to llover sobre mojado. Let’s take an example from the events of real life: now everybody knows that our Mexican athletes, with so much talent and potential, just don’t seem to be able to get past first base in international competition, except in two or three sports. Why? We’ve heard it a million times: the system is more worried about protecting vested economic interests (advertising, sales, promotion…) than in finding, training, and supporting new talent from the lowest levels up through serious school and neighborhood programs. Those athletes who do stand out eventually are almost always loners who succeed in spite of and not thanks to the system: the long distance runners and walkers, for example. So, what I am writing now is an example of Joe Shmoe lloviendo sobre mojado. And the worst of it is that nothing’s going to change, no matter how much we rain on what’s already wet, so long as the political system behind our almost non-existent athletic system remains autocratic and run by people much more interested in making tons money than in the discovery and training of truly solid athletes. It’s a mind-set sort of thing.
But then a miracle happens and something turns out right. When this occurs, we say Una de cal por las que van de arena, which means “One of limestone for the others of sand,” which is most likely a reference to the way cement is mixed, a combination of ingredients including sand and limestone. I don’t know much about cement mixing, but it seems that if you skimp on limestone, the building you’re putting up runs the risk of falling down. It’s a quality element. So, when something goes right, finally, you can say: una de cal por las que van de arena. I was counting on some good news on the footbal-soccer front, but it was the same old story: no hay nada nuevo bajo el sol, “there’s nothing new under the sun,” which — when you think about it — is a twisted way of alluding to the lloviendo sobre mojado theme. One would think that breakthroughs and inventions are novelties, but it usually turns out that they are technologically new ways of doing the same things we used to do some other way. You can work backwards, for example, from e-mail to faxes to phone calls to telegrams to letters and all the way back to smoke signals or drum rumbling. But deep down, it’s the same old thing: communication. And that makes us human. Thank God. Una de cal por las que van de arena.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank “Claudia G.” for her e-mail commenting on how this column is useful to her as a translator. Being a translator myself, I appreciate her remarks and heartily agree to her conclusions as to the inadequacy of the English title of Laura Esquivel’s first book: Like Water for Chocolate. It makes no sense. In Spanish, if someone is really mad about something, they are what in English is known as piping hot…, they are como agua para chocolate, the idea being that water must be very hot to melt chocolate in order to be used as a beverage. In cases like these, you can say: No me hables: estoy como agua para chocolate. This is a good phrase to use at those times when, without a doubt, no es lo duro sino lo tupido.
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