Lost in translation.

I´m in Buenos Aires with my sister this week enjoying a much needed vacation. However, I won´t pretend I haven´t been working to some degree. I speak Spanish. Rather, I used to and now I speak remnants. And as my traveling companion doesn´t speak any Spanish (because I don´t consider knowing how to ask where the bathrooms are actually speaking the language) my brain has received quite the workout.

Inevitably, when you don´t speak a language fluently, there are bound to be things lost in translation. A couple of such instances occured yesterday. First, my sister and I went out to the country with my friend Jose to go horseback riding. We were riding at the home of a professional polo player and his wife, who ended up joining us for lunch. They were wonderful people, and we enjoyed a great lunch of asado, risotto, and salad with them on their patio. After lunch, their maid brought us some dessert - panqueques con dulce de leche. These are basically crepes with a caramel-type sauce in them, and they are my favorite Argentinian dessert. My sister, recognizing the sauce inside the crepes as something from Mexican cooking, exclaims, ¨Ooooooh, crepes de cajeta!¨ She said this with tremendous pride and enthusiasm, as she had clearly wanted to be part of the Spanish-only conversations Jose and I had been having with the family. And her face lit up as she made an accurate, and relevant, contribution.

Unfortunately for my sister, in Argentina, ¨cajeta¨ means ¨pussy¨. (And I´m not talking about a cat.)

Needless to say, the entire table was horrified.

Most amusingly, the mealtime mortification continued last night. We went to dinner with my friend Virginia, and her boyfriend who is learning to speak English. Thus, the stage was set for a linguistical trainwreck. Me and my broken Spanish, Virginia and her conversational English, her boyfriend the new student, and my sister who thinks speaking English with a Spanish accent is basically the same as speaking Spanish. (¨I werk for thee goh-ber-ment,¨ is how she explains her occupation.)

At some point, the conversation turned to the guy I´m dating. Virginia remarked that I´m not a typical American, because I´m a white girl dating a Hispanic guy. I agreed that was probably true and, in Spanish, explained that my dating history has always resembled a Benneton ad. At that point, her boyfriend looks at me and says earnestly, ¨So then you date the niggers?¨ I´m not entirely sure how that was the obvious response to my statement, but as it was not said with any ill intent, my sister and I explained why the n word wasn´t the correct terminology. ¨But,¨ he countered with a look of confusion, ¨in the songs they say ´my nigger´?¨ and gave a lyric from a popular rap song.

I wanted to call Don Imus and have him give a more thorough explanation. But instead, I cleared up the confusion in my broken Spanish, and then laughed at the idea of sharing a pussy crepe with my nigger.