I enjoy and envy this song’s casually bilingual lyrics. The chorus:
Doesn’t matter what you celebrate y no importa que holiday
Ahora disfrutemos, ahora on a holiday
My mum tells me about how my Armenian grandmother, who spoke five languages before coming to Canada (none of them English), would chat with her multilingual friends, flitting between English, Italian, Armenian, French, and more, depending on which best suited the sentiment they were trying to express. I wish my friends and I were similarly fluid-fluent.
“What is one of your favourite words, in any language you speak?” is one of the time-filling icebreakers I used to deploy while waiting for iGEM volunteers to arrive at pandemic zoom calls. I often said my favourite English word is “awkward”, because it’s the word I most often find myself missing when speaking French or Spanish. “Awkward” is so specific; social discomfort, but milder than incómodo and less irritable than gênant.
The word disfrutar, nestled into quote above, is one of the words I miss most in English. In many contexts, it translates pretty directly to “enjoy”, but ahora disfrutemos gets auto-translated as now let’s enjoy and… enjoy what, exactly? Spanish offers an active verb, not making the choice to enjoy something but taking the action of enjoying, and I wish I could say that in English.
Esperando que disfrutes tus holidays,
(by which I mean: hoping you take actions that cause you to enjoy them, not just that they happen to be enjoyable)
- Tessa