Masticar la bronca

Las Leonas midfielder Agostina Alonso told press that Argentina’s women’s field hockey team would focus on processing the loss against the Netherlands at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where they eventually clinched the bronze medal. The way she said it, though, was masticar la bronca, literally something like “chew on the rage.” 

Thinking about how to translate this, I realized the word bronca is quite specific. “Rage” might be too far on the anger scale, but “annoyance,” which is what the internet suggests, doesn’t cover it. It’s like a minor fury with a helping of bitterness on the side: qué bronca.

I like the idea of “chewing” on a big feeling to make it more manageable…as long as you move on and it doesn’t become emotional rumination.

Falsedad ideológica

As always, judicial jargon is what most makes us want to tear our hair out. The answer to a tricky translation is to zoom out from the actual words and look at the underlying concept. While prevalent, “ideological falsehood” is not punishable by law, but the act of deliberately lying in a public document, a.k.a. forgery, definitely is. 

Opereta

Ah, operetas. If only we were talking about light opera. 

We’ve talked about carpetazos before, the moment when you finally hit someone you’ve been spying on with receipts. Publicly. It’s often ugly. That’s part of an operación política, the murky chessboard of cut-throat political maneuvering and wielding the media as a weapon. The victim is “operated on” — me están operando. Think high-profile accusations, supposed “scoops” being fed to the press, and sensitive information about a candidate surfacing at just the right moment to cause maximum damage. 

Many high-profile Argentines cry opereta when news breaks of their alleged wrongdoings. Now, opereta can be used as a synonym for operación política. But the way I see it, operación can involve both disinformation and inconvenient truths maliciously publicized. However, opereta is used almost exclusively to denote that the “operation” is based on lies and deceit. That’s my intuition, at least. Opereta can also refer to the agent of disinformation or espionage.

Either way, we’re well used to assuming operaciones and looking around for possible enemies with motive when someone gets burned. The term is thrown around so often that I’m genuinely surprised it hasn’t come up before. Anyone who followed Argentina this week will know, sadly, why carpetazo and opereta/operación were so prevalent in our news cycle.