When I read things in Spanish I often have a problem where I look up words I don't know, but I don't know the English word they translate to either. This passage from Borges has been kicking my ass so bad:
"Cuando, en 1874, murió de una viruela negra, no había visto jamás una montaña ni un pico de gas ni un molino. Tampoco una ciudad. En 1849, fue a Buenos Aires con una tropa del establecimiento de Francisco Xavier Acevedo; los troperos entraron en la ciudad para vaciar el cinto; Cruz, receloso, no salió de una fonda en el vecindario de los corrales."
In this passage, there are only two individual words I felt I couldn't decipher the meaning of: molino (which turns out to mean windmill), and fonda (which turns out to be a kind of small restaurant). Nevertheless, I had absolutely no idea what nearly any of this meant. To my eyes, I read this as:
"When, in 1874, he died of a black virus, he had never seen a mountain nor a gas pick nor a molino. Nor a city. In 1849 he went to Buenos Aires with a troop established by Francisco Xavier Acevedo; the troops entered the city to empty the belt; Cruz, suspicious, didn't leave the fonda in the neighborhood of the corrals."
What the fuck is a gas pick? I ask google translate, and it translates it as "gas peak". Thanks a fucking lot. And what does it mean to empty the belt? What's the neighborhood of the corrals? I put the whole passage into google translate and get something completely different from my own reading:
"When he died of black smallpox in 1874, he had never seen a mountain, a gas jet, or a windmill. Nor a city. In 1849, he went to Buenos Aires with a drove of cattle from Francisco Xavier Acevedo’s ranch; the drovers went into the city to spend their earnings, but Cruz, wary, never left an inn in the stockyard district."
Fuck me. He was a cattle driver? I thought he was a soldier, like his father. I guess earlier the story compared him to "gauchos idénticos a él", so it would make sense he's a literal gaucho, though I assumed the word was just used to mean "gentleman". I guess "tropa", in addition to its primary meaning, also refers to a herd of cattle, here called a "drove" of cattle, driven by "drovers" rather than drivers. The relationship between tropa and troperos here is clear enough given this I guess. "Vaciar el cinto" is clearly a colloquial term for spending money. I guess at some point in the history of either Spain or Argentina people used to keep money in their belts. Upon reflection it becomes clear that "corrales" doesn't mean corals (corales) but is instead related to the English verb "to corral" as in to corral animals. It's the corraling neighborhood, AKA the stockyard district. RAE doesn't give "Establecimiento" the additional meaning of "ranch", but I don't think my initial reading of "del establecimiento de" meaning "established by" was correct. I think it is referring to ranch in the sense of "local de comercio", and you just have to tell by context that the particular commercial estate in question is a ranch. This annoys me because I already know two Spanish words for ranch and would've understood this if Borges had used either of them.
As for a gas jet (yet another translation given by google translate was "gas derrick"), it's clearly a machine used for mining that's powered by gasoline. Googling "pico de gas" gives you the wikipedia page for "pico del gas", meaning "peak gas", so it's clearly not a very common term nor does it describe a very common thing.
And with that, I have successfully read three sentences of a short story. When I have kids I'm raising them bilingual. They're never gonna have to go through this shit. They're gonna cheat by acquiring all this in their critical period.
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