Starting a collection
One of my favorite parts of acquiring Spanish has been collecting idioms, sayings, and clichés.
I mean the kinds of phrases that Spanish speakers use all the time but that often don’t quite survive literal translation: llorar a lágrima viva1, tener la mosca detrás de la oreja2, estar hecho polvo3, irse el santo al cielo4. Some are funny, some are strange, and some are almost tiny poems in themselves.
For a while now, I’ve been adding to a running collection whenever I encounter one I like in books, videos, podcasts, or conversations. I’ve accumulated a couple dozen by now. I don’t really study them as vocabulary. Mostly, I just enjoy noticing and collecting them.
Taken together, the collection has started to feel like a little private museum. Each phrase is interesting on its own, but putting them next to one another creates connections I didn’t notice when I first encountered them.
Recently I decided to try doing something fun with them: write a song.
I’ve written before about creating songs in Spanish, but this was a more specific constraint. It was also a great way to dust off some of the sayings I’ve accumulated.
A house waiting for someone
At the same time, I’ve been listening to the latest album by The Mountain Goats. I’m a huge admirer of John Darnielle’s writing, especially the way he can use a handful of concrete images to establish a setting, feeling, or implied story without spelling everything out.
I’ve also always been drawn to a particular image (not from The Mountain Goats): someone setting a table for a huge dinner or gathering, only for nobody to arrive.
That became the starting point for the verses.
Rather than tell a clear story, I wanted to create a house that seems to be waiting for people who never come back. The domestic objects gradually take on lives of their own:
La casa duerme bajo el agua
la lámpara vela el lugar
mi sombra se cuelga de un cable
cada tarde vuelve a pesar
And later:
Las llaves roncan en el plato
las flores pierden el color
dimos el regreso por sentado
y el polvo aprendió el comedor
I don’t know exactly what happened in this house other than something vaguely awful and destructive, and I prefer it that way.
The images are supposed to suggest more than they explain.
Then the idioms arrive
The chorus works very differently.
The verses are slower and leave space around the images. Then the chorus arrives and the idioms start coming almost rapid-fire:
Lo hecho, hecho está
mi gozo, en un pozo
como quien oye llover
mirando el destrozo
Se hizo lo que se pudo
salió por la culata
discutiendo por nada
el arroz se nos pasaba
When looking through idioms to use, I realized that the ones I chose have a surprisingly consistent mood.
They’re all a little fatalistic. They’re all about trying to accept, or at least note, that everything’s gone wrong.
That may be part of what makes idioms useful: they’re ready-made language for moments when plain description feels inadequate. Here, each one lets the narrator acknowledge failure without ever having to explain it.
Lo hecho, hecho está — what’s done is done.
Mi gozo en un pozo — something you were excited or hopeful about ends in disappointment.
Como quien oye llover — to hear something without really paying it any attention, as though you’re simply listening to the rain.
Se hizo lo que se pudo — we did what we could.
Salir por la culata — for a plan to backfire or produce the opposite of what was intended.
Together, they start to sound like a series of small acts of resignation. Nobody explains exactly what went wrong. Instead, the chorus just keeps producing new ways of acknowledging that something did.
That ended up fitting the house in the verses remarkably well.
Bending the idioms a little
A couple of the expressions also made their way into the song less directly.
In:
dimos el regreso por sentado
the phrase dar por sentado means to take something for granted or assume it to be certain.
What gets taken for granted here is el regreso itself: the idea that someone or something would come back.
And then there’s the last line of the chorus:
el arroz se nos pasaba
which plays with pasársele el arroz a alguien.
The idiom is about letting the right moment or opportunity pass you by. But inside this particular song, the line can also work literally. There’s a house, a table, a meal, people who aren’t arriving — and while everyone keeps arguing, the rice is overcooking.
I especially like those moments because the idiom gains another resonance and feels like it really belongs to the little world of the song itself.
From collecting to using
That was probably the part of the experiment I found most satisfying.
I wasn’t trying to write a “song for learning Spanish idioms,” and I didn’t want to cram twenty expressions into the lyrics just because I’d collected them.
I wanted to see what happened when some of these phrases I’d been encountering for months collided with other things I like: music, images, ambiguity, and incomplete little stories.
At first, an idiom is something I hear in Spanish and think: that’s a great phrase. I save it because I figure it’ll be useful someday.
Then, eventually, one of those phrases ends up inside something I’ve made.
This is the finished song:
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To cry intensely or inconsolably; roughly, to sob one’s heart out. Literally, “to cry with live tears.” ↩︎
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To be suspicious or uneasy because you sense that something isn’t right. Literally, “to have the fly behind your ear.” ↩︎
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To be exhausted, devastated, or in very poor condition, depending on the context. Literally, “to be reduced to dust.” ↩︎
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To become distracted and lose your train of thought or forget what you were about to do. Literally, “for the saint to go up to heaven.” ↩︎
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