The exercise:
Today's prompt comes courtesy of the lovely g2 (she can also be found here): ¿Qué te pasó? I shall patiently await her corrections of my attempts at Spanish. At least I didn't try rhyming in it!
Oh, the English translation: what happened to you?
Isn't the Spanish version so much better?
Mine:
What happened to you, compadre?
I thought that I could count on you -
Were you not mi tesoro?
Did you forget what we went through?
Now we can't say buenos dias
Without envy joining the fray.
You can forget buenas tardes -
This is me bidding you good day.
5 comments:
Aww, a poem about getting rid of lost friends. Kind of sweet and sad intertwined! I think the Spanish works really well in there, but my Spanish is virtually non-existant -- enough to get me round Barcelona without annoying people.
¿Qué te pasó?
What happened to you? You look
Like you been startled and shook
up like a cocktail at Jay's.
You got a shell-shocked gaze
And I can hear my mamma sayin'
"If you be marryin', I be prayin'"
And I don't want you to be provin'
her right, so get you ass movin'
Sit it down over here and you know what you do?
You sit here and tell me what happened to you.
Ay, ¡qué bueno! And I'm certainly glad you didn't try to rhyme it. Y'done good with the little bit you sprinkled in, but I'm most thankful you didn't try to rhyme it. I'm don't think I'm gonna rhyme (at the moment... which may change...), but I'm definitely gonna do Spanish. Yay Spanish!
Que quieres saber es que quiero saber,
Debemos preguntarnos, supongo.
La respuesta tienes, la espero tener.
¿Y quieres respuestas? Las tengo.
¿Qué te pasó, mi compañero?
Necesito hablar contigo.
¿Qué te pasó, mi mejor amigo?
Debes compartir su mente conmigo.
No, I don't think I'll translate it, not now anyway. If you're absolutely dying to know what it means (whoever "you" happens to be), I guess I'll translate... but I think it'll lose something. Besides, one doesn't have to understand everything (s)he hears. ^^
I still can't believe I wrote off-the-cuff, more-or-less rhyming Spanish poetry. Woo!
Greg - thanks, glad you like it :)
I love the tone and rhythm of yours. It just caught me up and swept me along.
g2 - I did give it some serious thought... but common sense thankfully won out :)
I am curious what yours means, but I do understand bits here and there. I like the way it sounds as is, and these things always lose something in the translation. My vote is to leave it as is.
Then leave it I shall. But, to give you an idea, basically the narrator hasn't connected with a particular friend in quite some time, and each has been pondering some question to which the other friend has the answer.
The "¿Qué te pasó?" could either be "what happened to draw us apart for a while" or "what's been going on since we last met." Personally I like to think of it as the latter. ^^
Again, yay for common sense!
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