¡Anda la osa! (February 1, 1814)

You may think it’s helpful to know some Spanish when writing a novel whose hero has spent five years in Spain, but there are pitfalls.

Justin’s name, for one thing: I never considered how utterly alien its Spanish pronunciation is to a normal English-speaking tongue – and there’s no avoiding it, since it’s entirely natural for Pepe to call him Don Justín. The Scots have an advantage here, given that the Spanish j is pronounced like ch in loch. So Justín sounds a bit like “whose tin”, at least if you’re Scottish and aspirate the h in words like whose, whale, or when.

Swearing, for another: the most common expletive in Spanish is joder, or simply jo. Don’t ask me to translate that! By the time I started thinking about four-letter words to spice up the dialogue, I’d twigged that they’d better be manageable for an English-speaking tongue. There is an easy-to-pronounce alternative to joder, but I can’t even write it down, although Ana de Armas gets to say it in the penultimate (I think?) James Bond film. That’s why Justin and Pepe come out with less manly exclamations like Válgame Dios, Dios me libre (God save us!) or Anda la osa (Well I never!). Anda la osa is probably a bit twee, but it totally cracks me up, so I decided to use it anyway. Translated literally, it means "There goes the bear!"

Bear, ca. 1125.

Fresco from the church of San Baudelio in Casillas de Berlanga (Soria)

© Museo Nacional del Prado