Brodie, brodi, brodo
Friday, July 01, 2016
 |
| Roberto Baschetti reading Borges in the Buenos Aires Zoo, April 2016 |
Argentines living in the Southern Hemisphere seem to do
things differently or backwards.
I have the memory as a child of going for dinner at the
house of my parent’s friends and being offered soup at the end of the meal. The
rationale so I was told years later is that if the soup is very well made there
will be room for it after a big meal.
In Spanish, not only Argentine Spanish, Argentines are argentinos
and July is julio and Monday is lunes.
That’s not just the way it is but because it's is a rule established by the Real Academia
Española.
I have never known why the Índice (Index) is always at the
end of Argentine books. The titles of books including novels only capitalize
the first letter of the first word in the title. The same applies to the names
of the stories in a collection of shorts stories. In the index (at the end of
the book) the same ‘rule’ applies.
Since I could no longer bear not knowing this I fired off an
email to my friend Roberto Baschetti, a scholar who works at the Biblioteca
Nacional Argentina.
His answer, his reference to brodi was my mention of having
read last night Borges’s El informe de Brodie, (I will first include it here in Spanish) is most unscholarly:
por empezar brodi vendría a ser un caldo magro
ya que el verdadero caldo fuerte en italiano se llama brodo
la mayúscula-minúscula va solo en la primera
palabra porque el argentino por naturaleza es vago y hacerlo como vos decís
genera un esfuerzo extra. O sea: ¡¡¡ufa
che... no jodás !!! te contestarían.
a mi el índice me gusta más adelante no solo
porque lo veo primero, sino porque otros me dijeron que por atrás es muy
doloroso...................
je !!!!!
abrazo. r.b
Which loosely translates to:
to begin brodi
would end up being a very thin broth since the real strong and thick Italian
one is brodo.
the
lowercase-uppercase applies only to the first letter because the Argentine, by
nature is lazy, and to write it as you suggest would generate an extra effort.
Or they would answer: uffa, che…don’t screw
me around…!!!
i like the index in
the beginning not only because I see it first, but others have told me that in
back (behind) it hurts…
So I will never know.
