Aaron Oliver Calabuig Universitat Jaume I

The Fencing Master

He looked at himself in the mirror for the sixth time half an hour before, and he was pleased with what he saw. Few people of his acquaintance looked like him at his age. From a distance, he would have been taken for a young man, for he was slim and lithe, which he preserved by working continually. He had shaved himself with care with his old, ivory-handled English razor, and had trimmed his fine gray mustache more meticulously than usual. His white hair, which was a little curly at the back of the neck and at the temple, was combed backwards with the utmost care; his part, high on the left side, was as impeccable as if he had drawn it with the aid of a ruler.

He was in a good mood, excited, like a cadet, who was coming to his first assignation wearing his new uniform. That almost forgotten sensation, far from making him feel awkward, gratified him, made him revel it. He took his only perfume bottle and sprinkled it onto his hands; then he gently patted his cheeks with it. The lines around his grey eyes deepened as he smiled intimately.

He was clearly expecting nothing inappropriate from that meeting. Jaime Astarloa was too conscious of the situation to harbor any foolish illusion. He was, however, fully aware that there was something appealing in all of it — for the first time in his life, he had taken a woman as a client, and she was in fact Adela de Otero. This added a unique nuance to the situation, which he, without knowing why, described to himself as aesthetic. The fact that this new client belonged to the opposite sex was something that he had accepted — once he tore down his initial resistance, once he cornered his own prejudices so that he could only hear their feeble protests, they would be replaced with the great feeling that something new was coming to his until then monotonous existence. The fencing master was giving himself in to what he thought was a harmless adventure in the autumn of his life, a subtle game which involved newly recovered feelings, where he would be the only self-aware player.

Arturo Pérez Reverte. The Fencing Master

Aaron Oliver Calabuig Universitat Jaume I

2. Surprisingly enough, this sentence would be fairly easy to translate into English, because Spanish tends not to notch adjectives up, especially when they all refer to a single noun. This peculiar case in Spanish brings up the question of whether or not it should be adapted into English to make it sound natural (and it would indeed). I decided to do that, instead of trying to make it sound strange on purpose, which would had actually been a good decision. In this case, I rearranged all the adjectives to adhere to the laws of the adjective order in English. I did the same thing with “fine, grey mustache”, and left the rest of the sentence as it was, because it posed no major problems when trying to translate it.

3. I actually had to do a little bit of research. I first had to know the difference between customer and client. It appears that the difference between these two terms is rather unclear for most native speakers, but most of them agreed that customer implies a short-lasting, product-buying relationship (as the customer of a supermarket, for instance). The word client, however, implies some long-lasting relationship between the person who wants a service and the person who offers it (as in the case of the client of a lawyer, for instance). In that case, given that the fencing master is going to teach Adela, I’m willing to assume their relationship is going to be long.

Then, I decided to keep the word “client” as an acceptable first option, even though the word “student” was more self-explanatory. The latter, which is not present in the original text, is much more clear, direct and concise. However, “student” would actually mean taking it one step further, and I honestly believe that it would be an unnecessary addition. In this case, “cliente”, in Spanish, does not sound natural either, so it is not a bad option to translate it as it is.

4. That sentence is now also incorrect in Spanish for that matter. The Spanish “sujeto” and “predicado” cannot be separated by a comma, unless there is an “aposición”, a “vocativo” and just a few more cases. In English, it is much more blatant because commas are used much less regularly, which inevitably makes the English language to use short sentences.