Face of the earth: Faz de la tierra

As he was walking down the street and looking around at the overgrown yards, dusty windows, weeds protruding through the cracks in asphalt. The playful does trotting through the onboarding ramp to the highway, the overhead metro trains fallen off the tracks; a feeling hit him: he might be the last man on the face of the Earth. / Mientras estuvo caminando en la calle y mirando los jardínes descuidados, ventanas polvorientas, maleza saliendo del asfalto quebrado. Las venadas trotando alegres en la rampa de entrada a la carretera, los trenes de metro elevado caídos de los carriles; sintió de súbito: puede ser el último hombre en la faz de la tierra.

I’m adding this to the word of the day pile because it is an unintuitively direct translation. Although it is, in a sense, indirect, too. It’s direct if we’re thinking of directness from the perspective of the etymology: face and faz have their origins in the Latin “facia” (not to be confused with “fascia”).  Thus, the archivist would find it intuitive to translate the English face to “faz.” However, the indirectness of the translation is that “cara” is used to mean face in Spanish. I’ve never, in the hundreds of books, articles, poems, conversations, movies, shows, songs, I’ve encountered, seen “faz” used to mean “face,” except in the expression, “face of the earth.” E.g., I’ve never heard someone say “me vi en el espejo y me fijé en mi faz.” Someone would say “cara” there instead.

Inspired by this translation, check out my essay on faces and the self, wherein I muse about the problems with defining “face” in the normal ways; e.g., “the front of the head” nor does any appeal exclusively to orientation quite cut it.