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In so many words, looks like he is saying that she was illiterate, as the only "pluma" (pen) she would have, would be the pork she would eat for lunch and dinner.
The other nuance is that by eating pork, that indicated she had no Jewish blood.
Good luck on rendering this into English!
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 3 hrs (2019-07-02 03:19:07 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
You're welcome, Lydia!
I understand your feelings!
Hey, maybe there is some good play on words you could find with "eating a pen for lunch and dinner..." Mmm... Ufff! This is a challenge and a half, to say the least. Maybe some archaic word similar to pen?
With some poetic license, you might find something with a feather... ?
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 20 hrs (2019-07-02 20:08:18 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Hey, what about using "quills"?
That is,
3 quills
another term for penne ‘a dish of pasta quills tossed in a spicy tomato sauce’
when supplied with a quill she’d dash off a bill; and thus was she able to fill up her table with nothing less pleasant than pigeon or pheasant for everyday fare. The foie gras or jugged hare - at her behest - were kept for best, while to enhance her mood and wash down all this food, she’d never eschew the odd magnum or two
You have outdone yourself! I can't tell you how much I appreciate your brilliant input. I am thinking of using 'quill' or 'quill pen' as the closest she's ever been to a writing tool. Something along those lines.
all this data. It's funny that I kind of thought about the "pigeons" or any "fowls" as a metonimyc connection to this "pluma". I doubt this is because my grandmother was from Villanueva de los Infantes (where Don Francisco de Quevedo "ended" his life), but "todo ayuda"... :-) Maybe Lydia can find some play on words with some pigeon related culinary term... ? / At any rate, your contributions are AVE-some!! ;-))
Yes, Becky Sharp is another great example: Vanity Fair is a wonderful novel (I've never enjoyed anything else by Thackeray as much). It's a rich vein; there's Zola's Nana, for example. (It's usually obligatory at this point to mention Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.) The poem we have here is pretty crude by comparison. I agree; she doesn't seem to be genuinely interested in being a "good person". But the idea is certainly there in Guzmán de Alfarache, and ultimately it is largely thanks to that book (not an easy read) that the picaresque has been such a fruitful literary tradition for so long in so many places.
I may have misinterpreted the rules; anywhere, it's there or thereabouts.
you need to scroll up to page 3, where it embarks on "PRIMERA REGLA, que se dize Numerar",... followed by "Segunda regla llamada sumar", etc, etc. They have already been listed on Page 1.
And, of course, she couldn't have learned to write without first being able to read - at least, when it suited her.
Incidentally, I wasn't implying (above) that she was trying to improve herself in any way other than enriching herself at others' expense (hence being so adept at multiplying - again, when it suited her!
Absolutely; she is anything but dumb! Though it's a matter of native wit rather than learning.
It may be worth adding here that the desire to improve oneself by getting an education is a generic feature of the picaresque, though the desire to be live a genuinely good life is generally frustrated by a combination of bad luck and bad inclinations. For women, in any case, opportunities for actual schooling were virtually non-existent; higher-class women were educated at home.
Does this really mean she learned to write? I doubt it. Writing is alien to her character and career as a literary type. And it was relatively unusual even for women from higher classes to learn to read and write. Plenty of aristocratic women, probably most, were illiterate. She’s not the kind of person who runs a business or keeps accounts; she just wants to be comfortable at someone else’s expense, do her hair and her makeup, and eat well. I think the first line about writing is there just to set up the joke on “pluma”. And in the light of González Palencia’s account I am more confident that the line means that she ate poultry all the time: “en lugar de comer pasteles quiere regalarse con torta real o pichones empanados”. Pichones (pigeons) were expensive; the upper classes ate them. Poor people like her normally had to settle for pasteles. So the joke is she must have been good at writing: she had “plumas” all day!
Well then, the poem is basically a long series of jokes based on the idea of the contrast between the respectable front she puts up and the disreputable reality behind it. The idea that she is genuinely improving herself is alien to the genre; even if she genuinely tries, she can’t. Social determinism is taken for granted.
In the verses we’re considering here, it says she never studied basic arithmetic (the “five rules” are addition, subtraction, multiplication, simple division and long division); all she learned was “multiplication”: how to get rich (in the “school of life”). Not because she was stupid, but just because she never even went to school (she’s from the underclass); she was intelligent (discreta) enough to have learned them all, but didn’t. “Discreto” was a morally ambiguous term, which could imply mental acuity or simply astuteness, ability to see the main chance.
It’s like Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress. Here’s González Palencia:
“La Zangarilleja es una variación más [...] del tipo de la mujer desenvuelta y vagabunda, que, salida de las más bajas capas sociales, se dedica a la vida alegre, obteniendo durante algún breve tiempo ventajas materiales, y terminando su existencia triste y oscuramente en un hospital.”
That’s the generic description; here’s the summary of this poem:
“El proceso de vida de la Zangarilleja es el de tantas otras de todos los tiempos: principia de gorrona [prostitute] [...]; se instala luego en casa principal, acompañada de la inevitable Celestina, y en lugar de comer pasteles quiere regalarse con torta real o pichones empanados. Protegida primero por algún escribano [...] acaba en amiga de un duque, con lo cual anda ya en coche y gasta mucho tiempo en sus afeites y peinado. Cuando recibe la visita de algún pariente del pueblo, le despide pronto [...]. Y se casa al fin [...], aunque proponiéndose abandonar del todo su antiguo vivir [...]” http://www.memoriademadrid.es/download.php?nombre=bhm_revbam...
This is a long poem about a literary type: the zangarilleja, a trollop, a slovenly female vagabond trying to make good by her wits. The suffix -eja is intrinsically pejorative. The word is repeated in every verse. The DLE defines zangarilleja as “muchacha desaseada y vagabunda”; the Diccionario de autoridades (1739) says “La muchacha o moza puerca, y mal vestida, que anda vagando”, and quotes this very poem as an illustration.
The other line repeated in every verse, “zarandillo y andar”, expresses her mobility. A zarandillo was a small sieve. Autoridades again: “Zarandillo. Por semejanza se llama al que con viveza, y ligereza, anda de una parte à otra: y assi se dice andar como un zarandillo.”
This puts us firmly in the picaresque world. The basic idea is that she’s corrupt, astute, mobile geographically and socially, and that she ends badly. She starts as a prostitute, lives by her wits, by tricking people, and manages to enter a respectable household, to enjoy a comfortable life. She’s good at passing herself off as respectable, but it’s an act. She would like to throw off her past but ultimately can’t.
I saw a reference somewhere to a "Zangarilleja" who ended up extremely prosperous, but I didn't have the chance to follow this up. Could this be the same one, or were there loads of them? If it did happen to be "our" Zangarilleja, then there was also a reference somewhere to her raking in the cash. This could tie in with the fact that for all her pretence of being as dumb as any other girl, she was in fact a past master at the 3 R's when it suited her (she was particularly numerate, especially when it came to multiplication - the fourth of the five "reglas"!). It's a long poem, and I'm afraid I haven't had the chance to read all of it...
she actually is writing a lot of demands for payment, then this could also be tied in with the possibly wry reference in the first stanza to her ability to multiply!
the way I see it now, it could also read something like (and this is ONLY a vaguely possible interpretation!):
However, whenever she possesses a pen, she'll write and write to her heart's content
I was looking for the continuation of this verse in a bid to see if it shed any light on the meaning. This is only half of the original (?) verse, but, imo, the rest didn't seem relevant. Sorry I didn't copy and paste it though :( as others might have thought otherwise... I thought I had read somewhere in passing that there was a purpose to all this scribbling (demanding cash/payments??) but can't for the life of me find it now. The remainder of the verse didn't shed any light in this respect.
The comma after "si" probably is significant. "Si" (if) could well be "sí" (yes); the absence of a written accent would not be unusual in a text of this period.
The presence or absence of an accent after "comer" is almost certainly insignificant, since a comma before "y", which is nowadays wrong by Academy rules, was quite common in the seventeenth century.
One further thought: I wonder whether "pluma", as well as being a metonym for writing on the primary level, might also be a metonym for birds on a secondary level: that is, she now eats game birds for lunch and dinner, as a way of saying that she is now prosperous. Just an idea; it could well be quite wrong.
another version is punctuated slightly differently
17:36 Jul 2, 2019
I don't know if this could make any difference to the interpretation; it's from REVISTA DE LA BIBLIOTECA ARCHIVO T MUSEO, AÑO II.-ABRIL, 1925.-NÚMERO VI...
A escribir, si, por tener la Zangarilleja pluma a comer, y cenar, çarandillo andar.
In so many words, looks like he is saying that she was illiterate, as the only "pluma" (pen) she would have, would be the pork she would eat for lunch and dinner.
The other nuance is that by eating pork, that indicated she had no Jewish blood.
Good luck on rendering this into English!
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 3 hrs (2019-07-02 03:19:07 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
You're welcome, Lydia!
I understand your feelings!
Hey, maybe there is some good play on words you could find with "eating a pen for lunch and dinner..." Mmm... Ufff! This is a challenge and a half, to say the least. Maybe some archaic word similar to pen?
With some poetic license, you might find something with a feather... ?
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 20 hrs (2019-07-02 20:08:18 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Hey, what about using "quills"?
That is,
3 quills
another term for penne ‘a dish of pasta quills tossed in a spicy tomato sauce’
Reference information: Yo no se de cuando es el texto, pero hasta el siglo XVI, las dos lenguas eram lo mismo: https://www.dicio.com.br/emplumar/ plumar - Variação de emplumar. - [Figurado] Pavonearse, envanecerse. engreirse feather in one's cap: If you describe something that someone has achieved as a feather in their cap, you mean that they can be proud of it or that it might bring them some advantage.- https://www.collinsdictionary.com/pt/dictionary/english/feat... swank [verb] a slang word for swagger - to behave or talk in a conceited way. plumear - 2. (Méx) (= ser prostituta) → to be on the game - https://es.thefreedictionary.com/plumear
José Patrício Portugal Native speaker of: Portuguese
Note to reference poster
Asker: El problema es que estas definiciones no parecen encajar en este contexto. Por lo menos yo no lo veo. 'A escribir, si por tener
pluma a comer y cenar'
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