el crispito

At times my writing involves my talking to myself in an empty room or an otherwise vacant apartment. After hours though, I try to keep any such conversations down to a minimal whisper, like I'm trying to impress myself in a dark corner booth of a dim lounge over a Scotch with my saucy reparté. Usually, it's a terribly unpolished pick-up, and I'm not having any of it. It's disheartening to be both flailing around uselessly in pathetic lines as you listen to how they make you sound like a corny hack. I can avoid that by turning off the volume and thinking the lines.

When I'm writing with the volume on the television turned up and I say what I'm writing or what I'm thinking, the program or commercial on television will chime in at a frighteningly appropriate moment with something amazingly prescient or beautifully non sequitur. When it is turned down, the Spanish-language programming doles this out in visual form, but programming originally done in English with subtitles in Spanish also gives it to me with silent words, mouthed like inaudible whispers.

Who can resist listening to a whisper? It demands that you listen. If it is intended for you, it often relates information of the utmost importance or maybe an offer of extremely titilating interest. If it is not intended for you, you feel like you're in on something. Delicious double entenres can be used in both spoken and written language. In subtitles it happens both ways: unintentionally funny words get used from time to time, and at times, the subtitle puts the tongue in the wrong cheek and blows the humor of a double entendre that is intended in the original. Sometimes it's amusing.

Last night, Diamonds are Forever was on one of the movie channels as I worked. I looked up at the end of the film, after James has saved the day and Jill Saint John has bounced herself voluptuously into the hearts of all the straight men in the audience with her inpired machine-gun and bikini bit, to catch a scene featuring the straight-as-Smithers assassins Misters Wint and Kidd. Wint and Kidd play the role of the villains (like Jaws in Moonraker), who come back in a comedic coda to tie up their not having been neatly dispatched through the carnage of the final fight scene. True to form, this mincing murder machine is trying to kill James Bond again, even though Blofeld is out of the picture and it is not clear that they have any motive other than their commitment to the bit.

The sequence opens with Bond and Tiffany Case Jones jousting with wordplay on the balcony of a luxury liner stateroom when they are interrupted by a knock at the door. Mister Wint and Mister Kidd are disguised as stewards, bringing an elegant gourmet room service meal that they claim is with the compliments of the rich Texan that James saved earlier. Mr. Wint details the menu while Mr. Kidd does theatrical reveals of each dish as it is detailed. For desert, they have a bombe suprise (pronounced like "BOMB-bh soo-PREEZ"), which, Mr. Wint briefly exposes to the audience as a fake, with a time bomb hidden inside. Cute.

Yet the Spanish subtitles render "And for dessert...bombe suprise" as:

Para el postre...un explosivo sorpresa.

or "For desert...a suprise explosive."

So much for subtlety.