dubbing ghosts

We speak and even live more and more like characters in a dubbed film, in which there is always a disconnection between faces and voices, a discordance between the world that the film represents and the artificial language grafted onto it, oblivious to any true accent. , although attempting a forced proximity to the language of origin.

Also the language we speak is similar to that of the dubbing, because it is influenced, contaminated by it, and we already say that something is fucking or damn this or that, and the epithet “puto” aspires to equivalence with the admired

fucking

of movies and novels.

This imitation allows us to imagine that we are almost speaking the language of the empire to which we belong as distant colonial subjects, and towards which we are always looking with the fascination of those servants who, instead of freedom, docilely aspire to the favor of their sirs.

The inferiority complex is allied in us with snobbery.

We speak badly or completely ignore that language that seems superior to our own, but we adorn ourselves with the costume jewelry of its almost always poorly used words, of its poorly translated phrases and expressions, and by the simple fact of displaying them we feel that we are more intelligent, or

cooler.

We do

spoilers,

we practice

running,

we regret

bullying,

we avoid

ghosting,

we denounce

lawfare,

we dedicate ourselves to

binge-watching

on streaming channels

,

we cultivate

networking,

we long to receive

feedback

on our

inputs.

A barbershop loses all its archaic Spanish connotation if it is called

barbershop

, and in a gym it no longer smells like rude male sweat if it says

wellness center on the door.

A fashion week that, according to all indications, does not give much of itself becomes instantly relevant if it is baptized Fashion Week.

A business school better prepares future

hawks

of power and money if it is called Business School.

On my street in Madrid you can count the English-speaking visitors on one hand, but there are hardly any business signs left that are not in sometimes approximate English: Urban Poke, Coffee & Lounge, Look to Nails, Lashes & Go, Indian Kitchen, Dental Smile, Tattoo Parlor, DietFlash, Any Beauty Salon, Smashed Burgers.

We are a bent culture, specters of a mediocre translation, admirers of a party to which we will never be invited, except as troupes or service personnel.

Everywhere we look we see the luxurious images of the empire's omnipresent visual culture: in advertisements, in movies, in series, in the decoration of imperial junk food chains, in the uniforms of their clerks.

We are always looking with reverence, even adoration, towards the metropolis, but the metropolis has not the slightest curiosity about us, and it is very likely that it will never be known that we exist, except in the case that in our territory they were in jeopardize their interests.

What we do not copy literally we trace.

We make our words what translators call “false friends,” because, being very similar in form, they have different meanings.

In history books translated from English, soldiers are no longer housed in barracks, but in barracks, because the English word for barracks is

barracks.

Sometimes, a poor translator becomes a miracle worker and brings a dead person back to life, and writes “resurrect” where he puts

resuscitate,

which in English is to reanimate someone who has lost consciousness.

I do not defend an impossible purity, and also unnecessary.

Languages ​​are made with contamination and mixture.

More serious is the copying and mistranslation not only of the words, but of the experiences themselves, the entire life, even the political atmosphere.

We live pending the celebrations of the empire.

The empire is the American empire but also, still, the British Empire.

One was stupefied, in a country so indifferent and even hostile to its own Monarchy, watching in the live broadcast the imperial and baroque waste of the funeral for Queen Elizabeth II of England, and then the coronation of Charles III.

We dress up children on Halloween and make them absurdly say “trick or treat” because we imagine that that is what

trick or treat means.

And the same thing that we imitate, to the extent of our limited strength, with meritorious mimicry, their

Oscar and Globe ceremonies, their nominations and yearning openings of envelopes and endearing thanks, we also imitate their “cultural” brawls, forgetting that

culture

does not mean the same thing

.

same as “culture”, and that the social conditions, the political life, the ethnic complexity of the United States, have very little to do with the Spanish reality.

The noblest and most urgent causes—equality between men and women, respect for each person's life choices, protection of the weak, reparation as much as possible for historical injustices—now reach us through a more still tortuous because it is made of poorly translated terms, of fetish words that come from American university jargon.

Every time I read someone who, to be very up to date, uses the term “brown bodies”, referring to what was previously called mestizos, I cannot forget that this comes directly from

brown bodies,

and that it would be more natural to call them. brown

We have copied an identity obsession that locks people into groups hermetically isolated from each other and hostile to each other, without the slightest trace of the old dream of human emancipation.

We have accepted the sexual obsession of a culture inherited from extreme religious puritanism, which imposes sentences of exclusion and public infamy on sinners or those simply suspected, like the scarlet letter that forever infamous Hawthorne's adulterous wife.

We have copied a chromatic, epidermal and decorative idea of ​​diversity that looks very good in luxury magazines and conceals the suppression of pluralism in opinions, and the automatic suspicion of those who dissent, who are given the name that they a fickle fashion imposes itself at every moment.

Among us, the fervor of imperial mimicry has reached the extreme of collective indignation and the tearing of clothes because a film as banal and mercenary as the doll that stars in it (but adorned with a veneer of feminism, like those additives that give flavor to fruit to the simple sugar of sweets) has not obtained I don't know what nominations at the Oscars.

In another example of our translated policy, the Minister of Culture has announced the decolonization of Spanish museums, and, at the same time that the patriots of the right were attacking him, in these same pages Jordi Amat impetuously denounced him as a stale and nostalgic Spanishist of the empire to anyone who dared to criticize the minister.

But it is not a reactionary tantrum to specify that the heart of Spanish museums does not come from colonial plunder, but from the commissions of the Church and the collecting of kings and if it is true that there are treasures stolen in America in Spain, and that they do not exist colonialisms that are less indecent or inhuman than others, it is also true that in the museums of Europe and the United States there are many outstanding works of art that would legitimately belong to the Spanish heritage if they had not been stolen or undersold in our centuries of greatest ignorance and hardship.

In an environment of “culture war”, to use another misleading copy, in which Barbie has become more revolutionary than Mary Wollstonecraft and Rosa Luxemburg combined, the most urgent thing of all is to decolonize our brains.

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