After the meal, the lovely (and untranslatable?) ‘sobremesa’

Enlace al español/Link here for Spanish

Dear reader,

Imagine a tasty and pleasant meal shared with friends, or at a family reunion.  Dessert is finished.  Now comes coffee, or perhaps cordials… maybe some other confection… and more coffee… And all the while, the conversation rolls on, the stories, the jokes.

Spanish has a term for it: la sobremesa, when the talk and the laughter are just more food and drink.

After the meal, that long session of coffee, or tea, or wine, or dessert, or a combination of these… but conversation as the main dish. It’s the ‘sobremesa’ so important in Spanish/Latin American culture… and virtually untranslatable into English.

How to translate this lovely, expressive word into English?

That’s quite a puzzle, because sobremesa simply has no exact equivalent in English—not even a fairly close one.

The attempts at translation we’ve seen (“table talk,” “after-dinner conversation,” and “sitting on after a meal,” among others) describe it, barely. And, really, la sobremesa is more than any of those things!

But, phrases like these may be the best we have.  Sometimes that’s how we translate, by describing, even if the result is inexact and clumsy.

At other times, the foreign word is used directly.  It typically happens when the translator has the need, or luxury, of emphasizing how different the other culture is: this is the case of many novels and anthropological accounts.

It’s an intriguing question, why one language lacks a word for something another names. Clearly, English speakers have “sobremesas,” though likely less frequent and less lengthy.  Our sense is that it doesn’t quite have enough importance, in this culture, to have “rated” being given a name.

¡Buenas palabras!

Pablo

Copyright 2013 Pablo Julián Davis. All rights reserved.