LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

 Me van a permitir soltar un par de clichés lingüísticos y sociológicos: todo cambia, ya nada es como era en mis tiempos… Hablemos de los políticos. Pedro Sánchez le ha dado un vuelco al idioma en más de una ocasión con aquello de «mentir no es mentir, es cambiar de opinión». También ha quedado trastocado aquel viejo dicho que rezaba: «lo prometido es deuda», que los ingleses traducían literalmente como « promise is debt» . Este político, muy comunista él, promete a las masas empleos dignos y bien retribuidos, casas por doquier, más dinero para los pensionistas, transporte público de calidad y barato, frenar a la ultraderecha, canalla y maldita, y ponerla en la picota. Todo vale, porque ahora lo prometido ya no es deuda. Lo prometido no vale nada: es papel mojado, palabras que se lleva el viento y que pronto se olvidan. Y yo, que vivo en Las Batuecas, todavía creo en la palabra dada, en el honor, en la amistad, en la integridad; todavía creo que lo prometido es deuda.

 ¡Españoles y españolas! Hoy comparezco ante vosotros, no solo como presidente del Gobierno, sino como un hombre que cree en el futuro. Y os pregunto: ¿qué es el futuro sino el presente que todavía tenemos que mejorar? Hemos conseguido mucho. Muchísimo. Pero debemos hacer más. Porque hacer más no consiste simplemente en hacer más, sino en hacer lo que hay que hacer, cuando hay que hacerlo y para quienes hay que hacerlo. Algunos dicen que tenemos un problema. A quienes dicen que tenemos un problema, les digo: el problema no es que tengamos un problema. El problema es creer que un problema no puede convertirse en una oportunidad. Y nosotros convertiremos cada problema en una oportunidad, cada obstáculo en un peldaño y cada crítica en una prueba de que estamos avanzando. Porque España merece más. España exige más. Y este Gobierno, mi Gobierno, el Gobierno de todos los españoles, seguirá trabajando sin descanso, día tras día, noche tras noche, dejándose la piel, por una España más prós...

Reading some poetry by the brand-new Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Anne Carson, I was reminded of Guillermo de Torre, the Spanish ultraist poet, and of how Julio Casares took him to task in an article titled   «Hélices, por Guillermo de Torre» . Casares discusses ultraist poetry with considerable humor and a good deal of sarcasm. The article dates from 1920, 106 years before Carson won the Nobel Prize. Yet the two poets have something in common that is worth pointing out. Casares quotes a poem by de Torre entitled «Fotogenia»: Rostros, Muecas, Visajes Acordes faciales de la emoción iluminada Gestos dardeantes... Now consider these lines by Anne Carson: It's good to be neuter. I want to have meaningless legs. There are things unbearable. ................................................. It is curious how poetry repeats itself. A century separates these two writers, yet both seem to challenge our expectations of what a poem should say, and how it should say it. One was ridiculed ...

  “There is no problem that the mind of man can set, that the mind of man cannot solve.” I have always attributed this quotation to Dr. Samuel Johnson; however, it seems I was wrong. I have been unable to authenticate it from Johnson’s writings. Where, then, did I get it from? Google led me to Dr. Terence Meaden’s CV, in which he attributes these very words to Dr. Johnson. Misquotations abound, as do misattributions, but what are we to do about them? Must we double-check every quotation we encounter for the first time? I suggest that, when we cannot trace a quotation to its original source, we should at least identify the source from which we have taken it. In this case, we might write: “As Dr. Terence Meaden attributes it to Dr. Johnson in his online CV: ‘There is no problem that the mind of man can set that the mind of man cannot solve.’” It is not proof that Johnson said it, of course. But at least we are being honest about our source. Is that not preferable to perpetuating a po...

  I think the Nobel Prize in Literature is an event worth looking forward to. This year, 2026, it has been awarded to Anne Carson (1950–), a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and teacher. I should have known that she was the recipient of the Spanish Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2020. I dutifully follow the proceedings on television from Oviedo every year in the fall, but somehow I missed her. This is therefore another of my literary confessions: I had never heard of Anne Patricia Carson. To my shame, I suppose. I tender my congratulations to her and to the English-language literary world. The fact that she has devoted so much of her life to Greek and classical literature in this day and age says something about her, and perhaps also about the enduring power of the humanities. We have someone comparable in Spain: Professor Irene Vallejo, author of the well-known El infinito en un junco ( Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World ). These two women have...

Shakespeare comes to our aid often, as in this case about brevity in speech and writing:   Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit , And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief . Your noble son is mad. . . . ( Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2. )