Yes I know, the Sanford affair has been covered ad nauseam by the U.S. media.
As a translator for Watching America, I have been scanning the Latin press for any spicy articles on the subject.
Surprisingly—except for the initial flurry of rather factual articles—the Spanish and Latin press have been quite sedate about the entire episode.
In a piece about a week ago, I posted a few links to some of those initial articles—articles with headlines such as “Governor Sanford had not disappeared. Instead, he was with his lover in Argentina.” and “In Argentina, a U.S. governor deceives his spouse.”
Perhaps the most “colorful” was cronica.com’s, “Yankee governor was in Buenos Aires ‘pirating around’”
Thus, the scuttlebutt that Americans are obsessed with the sexual peccadilloes of their politicians may be true, after all.
But leave it up to the Italians to romanticize and to spice-up the story.
Starting with the title, “Mark Sanford, la fuga d’amore decapita il partito repubblicano,” of an article in Italy’s La Stampa, we get a whiff of both romance and high political drama.
My Italian is not very good, but I would have translated the title literally as “Mark Sanford, Love’s flight decapitates the Republican Party.”
Watching America’s translator, Randy Johnson—who does an excellent job of translating the piece—prefers the title, “Governor’s Latin American Tryst Too Hot To Handle,” a title that is just as piquant.
I encourage you to read Johnson’s translation at Watching America (watchingamerica.com), to get a flavor of what I had expected the Latin coverage would be of this ardent, amorous, lustful, torrid, sultry, scorching story—I have an excellent thesaurus.
Here are some tidbits:
Mark Sanford’s love escapade has decapitated the Republican Party.
In fact, this time it was not the Appalachian Mountains that was Sanford’s solitary destination but the rather more exotic Argentina, where the governor had gone for a very special sort of hike between the sheets of his Latin American mistress.
Instead, the dream of the White House was shattered in Buenos Aires, where the governor spent a few hot nights with his mistress.
My Italian dictionary gives several translations for “fuga,” among them: escape, flight and leak.
As an example for the use of fuga, it gives “fuga di cervelli,” which translates as “brain drain.”
In this torrid tale, the latter might be the most appropiate translation, given the the context of the story.
Image courtesy of argentine_embassy_uk.org
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.