Lose Those Pronouns!
Last week we were talking about how the Spanish language tends to be long winded in comparison to English. When translating from English to Spanish, the finished product usually has about 20% more pages than the original. And then Stanley Brandes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, jumped into the conversation via e-mail: “Your article in unasletras about Shakespeare’s Spanish Syllables is interesting. I have often contemplated the possibility that English is more compact than Spanish. But what about the following sentences? Voy hoy. ‘I am going today.’ Or Duerme. ‘He is sleeping.’ There are lots of contrary examples such as these.”
Mr. Brandes, of course, is correct. There are cases in which Spanish uses fewer words than English to express the same idea. In the cases he has put forth, the anthropology professor has chosen sentences whose subject is tacit. In Spanish, unlike English, we don’t always see the subject of a sentence. In Voy hoy, for example, one doesn’t need to use the pronoun yo (I), because the simple conjugation of the verb is more than enough to let us know who is going. In English, on the other hand, one must say I go; you go; he, she, or it goes; we go; you (plural) go; they go; etc. The pronoun is inevitable because —in the present at least— there is only one difference in the verb form itself: the third person singular, goes. It’s even worse in the past: everything went. If it weren’t for the pronoun, we wouldn’t have a clear idea at all about who was going where. So, English has to pay a small price for having a relatively simple system of conjugation, and that price is the need to use personal pronouns. Spanish, as we have already seen, can dispense with the pronouns, so long as the context makes it clear who is behind the action of the verb at hand. In the case of the first and second persons, Voy hoy or Vas hoy, there is never any problem because the only possibilities are yo and tú. This doesn’t hold true for the other persons. Let’s take another look at Mr. Brandes’s second example: Duerme. He could be talking about Juan or María, about él or ella, or even usted. Only context will let us know. And even within context we must be careful, because if there are two third persons in the sentence, there could be confusion, as in the following: Juan siempre está molesto con María porque quiere dormir hasta después de las diez. (Juan is always upset with María because [he or she] wants to sleep until after ten. So, who wants to sleep past ten o’clock, Juan or María? Is Juan upset because María won’t let him sleep late, or because María can’t rip herself away from the bed sheets?
To solve this problem we would have to do some linguistic fondling. The academic way would be to use a demonstrative pronoun: Juan siempre está molesto con María porque ésta quiere dormir hasta después de las diez. Or: Juan siempre está molesto con María porque aquél quiere dormir hasta después de las diez. Less academic would be the use of the simple pronoun: porque ella..., and porque él. Another way out would be to attack the syntax by changing the order of the words: Juan, porque quiere dormir hasta después de las diez, siempre está molesto con María. Or: Porque María quiere dormir hasta después de las diez, Juan siempre está molesto con ella. One is used to a certain proliferation of pronouns in English because they are necessary. That’s why in novels you see so many “he saids” and “she saids.” In the eyes of a Spanish-language reader, however, this is very unimaginative and unbelievably repetitive. Just about any writer here in Mexico, Argetina, Spain, or wherever, will be able to rattle off at least ten synonyms for “he said”: afirmó, adujo, sostuvo, increpó, contestó, respondió, espetó, informó, expresó, expuso, propuso, observó, precisó, confesó, declaró, profirió, alegó, anunció, etc. This is all possible in English as well, of course, but the urgent need for variety just doesn’t seem to be there.As long as we are talking about English being a to-the-point language, there is another way it gets away with using less words than Spanish: the present participle. In English we can say “He sent a box containing 50 books,” or a “She wrote a letter asking for money.” The words “containing” and “asking” in these cases are adjectival because they tell us what kind of box and what kind of letter. In Spanish, however, we cannot say “una caja conteniendo 50 libros” or “una carta pidiendo dinero” because Spanish grammar does not allow us to use gerundios (that’s what they’re called) as adjectives. We must say “una caja que contiene 50 libros” and “una carta donde [en que, en la cual] pedía dinero.”
There are one or two words more, but who cares if it makes everything absolutely clear? Shakespeare would have had a ball if he had written in Spanish. He might have even sounded a little like Miguel de Cervantes.
If you would like to know more about any idiomatic expressions you may
have heard, or about any Spanish-language difficulties,
feel free to contact me at sandrocohen@gmail.com
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