To Pretend: Hacer como que
“Y José, cuando vio a sus hermanos, los conoció; mas hizo como que no los conocía, y les habló ásperamente…”
Génesis 42:7
“When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them, but he pretended to be a stranger to them and spoke to them harshly…”
Genesis 42:7 NET1
While I would be inclined to agree that, for academic work, I would have to demonstrate that this word is actually difficult to translate, I will only briefly do so here. If you are like me, you have enough experience in Spanish to know that the common output of interlingual dictionaries and online translating apps “fingir” is not quite right; native speakers do not often say “fingir” in the same contexts in which we would say “pretend” in English and, if they occasionally do, it is not the first word or phrase they use. I find this word particularly important to translate because it is a word we use often, somewhere below terms like “to be” or “to cook” but above those like “to play a (sport).”
Spanish learners of a certain level will all know that “pretender” is not “to pretend” in the common sense in which we use it in English (although these words do share a less common sense, “to take it upon oneself” or “to endeavor”). Oddly enough, the very sense in which the translation of <<pretend>> is elusive is that which is the first definition of feign, “to give a false appearance of,” which shares fingir’s Latin root in fingere, “to share or form.” That is just to insist that, despite these official and formal endorsements of fingir as the correct translation, it is not correct and not what people usually say.
While I can find examples of that usage online, I’ll reiterate that I’ve rarely if ever heard it in real life, never seen it in a book, and, whenever I did, it was not used quite the same as pretend. If it had been, I would have forgotten about the urge to better translate the word. My guess is that fingir is a word that people really do use but perhaps more sparingly and formally, like feign. To rely for a second on some of Diana Taylor’s language, there is archived evidence of that—if you’ll notice the instances in the link I’ve just provided, they are all in parliamentary or political contexts.
Many years later, I have found the translation I was seeking—it all clicked, and hundreds of instances of this usage popped into my head, from chats among friends to conversations with partners, scenes from movies and television, and so forth. “To pretend” best translates to “hacer como que” (not “hacer como si,” although the meaning is very similar, which I will soon review).
Again, I must have heard this hundreds, maybe even thousands of times spread over a decade. But it did not click until I took it upon myself to reread the Bible (the word religion coming from Latin relegere—to read again) because that formal translation to fingir is that which all dictionaries list as the first way to translate the word.
There are a lot of reasons I’ve sought to reread the Bible. I do not wish to expound upon them here but, for context, I will reveal the reading strategies those reasons have lead to. That should bolster credence in the source and evidence for my translation. One, I wish to approximate my understanding to the original text as it was written, in large part in order to determine how gendered the Bible originally was or, at least, how far back its gendered meanings extend2. I cannot do that, since I cannot read Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. But I can read a very old version if I read some of the original translations into popular languages. I was not able to find the Wycliffe Bibles, the original translations of the Latin into English, online. However, the original 1569 Reina Valera by Casiodoro de Reina is available online and in an Android app, so I figure that will be as close as I get in the foreseeable future. I admit that it is at best a translation of a translation since, obviously to some, Latin was not the original language, either; and that implies some amount of the telephone game. Second, I figure that, no matter how atheist we all claim to be these days, most English and Spanish speakers have read the Bible or been to church or even Sunday school, so you and they certainly have internalized a lot of the language thereof to the extent that I find it not just prudent to read the Bible in my aspiration to improve my Spanish but it is a shame and a little ridiculous that I have not been guided to do so in the past, thinking of it only of my own volition. Reading a culture’s religious text in their language is perhaps the strongest approach for acting on my common refrain to language learners: learning about the people you will be speaking to is nearly as important as learning the syntax and semantics of their language. The Bible is probably still the principal linguistic foundation for Western culture, especially for the cultutrally top-down Catholic countries like Spain, Italy and so forth3. I would recommend the same for learners of Italian: if you’re not reading the Bible, then you’re significantly hindering your progress in the language4.
So I was reading Genesis and got to the part where Joseph pretends not to know his brothers. I will elide some details important for the meaning of the story but unnecessary for our purposes. Joseph is the son of Jacob, who is the son of Isaac, son of Abraham, the principal patriarch of the Abrahamic religions—the man from whose genealogy spring most of the protagonists in the Biblical, Talmudic, and Qurannic stories. Joseph’s brothers had sold him away from the family home in Canaan into slavery in Egypt and, through very impressive and varying parabolic conditions, he worked his way up the chain to being the Pharaoh’s right hand man. During a famine in Canaan, the brothers traverse the desert to ask the Egyptians for food. The details are unspoken but it seems that the first person they come into contact with is Joseph and in the Pharaoh’s court no less (Genesis 42:6-7). Recognizing them but apparently wishing to intimidate them or exact some righteous wrath, “hizo como que no los conocía, y les habló ásperamente…” (RVR1960). That is, he pretended that he did not know them and he spoke ruggedly to them (or “roughly unto” or “harshly to” depending on the translation; I instinctively translated to “ruggedly” because the principal definitions of áspero in the DLE.RAE refer to uneven rocks or terrain, which we often call rugged…complicating matters, while here I have used the 1960 edition of the Reina Valera, in the original by Casiodoro, it actually says “hizo que no los conocía, y hablóles ásperamente…” but “hizo que” certainly does not work in today’s parlance and I wonder whether it is a typo by Casiodoro or the makers of the app). That was my aha moment—it is very clear what Joseph is doing here. He is pretending.
Now, why not hacer como si? It is a very similar phrase. In order to demonstrate the difference, I will need to detail a little more precisely what we mean in the U.S. when we say “pretend,” which is usually so obvious as to forego definition, “to give a false appearance of or to feign.” We might not notice about that definition that “appearance” implies that our action is being received; in other words, we are pretending for the purposes of others or causing a result in them—whether we are pretending because we are lying to them or putting on a show for various reasons. Hacer como si, on the other hand, translates quite directly to “to act as if.” Note that here the words “false” and “appearance” are absent. When we are pretending, we are doing it for others; when we are acting as if, we might do it for others’ or our own purposes. I take for example a moment in the irreverent Concha Podcast, “aunque no crean, hagan como si…”. While that particular phrase does not translate directly, instead translating to “even if y’all don’t believe, act like you do,” and is equivocal between hacer como si and hacer como sí, it still reinforces my translation—hacer como si means to act as if P for whatever reason, not to pretend in order to cause something in others.
In short, the main difference, usually though not always, between hacer como que and hacer como si is the subject of persuasion. If you are acting according to something you do not believe in for your own purposes, for example, a religion in order to reap the benefits of religious practice, estás haciendo como si creyeras / you are acting as if you believe; if you are acting according to something you do not believe in in order to persuade others, for example, acting like an invitee to a event in order to gain access or acting like Puck in order to ensconce the audience into your play, estás haciendo como que / you are pretending. If you are pretending to be Catholic in order to survive persecution during the inquisition, estás haciendo como que (qué horror por un lado e inspiración por otro se me provocó cuando aprendí que era tan común que un judío hacía como converso pero seguía practicando el judaísmo que existe una palabra para ello, “marrano”). And so forth. However, one of the lovely things about language is that it is fluid and fuzzy, so surely there are and will be exceptions to those generalities. But this is the translation of pretend as I see it.
Epilogue:
Since I have been trying to translate this term for years, I have had time to think about it. Why is there so much confusion around pretending? Why would the official story continually be the lazy connection to the Latin root fingere? Even in college, which I initially attended in order to study film—one of the fine arts of pretending—this confusion continually arose. I do not wish to distract from the translation I’ve done so I will save a thorough and articulate discussion for another publication, though I will try to demonstrate that there is a discussion to be had.
The short answer is that—and this is true despite the fact that I have given a definition above—it’s not very clear what pretending even is. Definitions of it or discussion around it tend to refer to nonexistence, which raises logical and metaphysical issues, when they say things like “to give a false appearance” and then define false in terms of “reality.” I’ll try to clarify through metaphor. Let’s say you put on a mask. The mask is not unreal; it exists. If it causes some thoughts or feelings in the people who perceive it, those are also real and their informational content is real. So it’s not unreality nor nonexistence that is relevant to pretending.
Another issue of discussions around pretending or pretension is lack of reference to intention, which, on the one hand seems basic to understanding pretending and, on the other, complicates discussion of it because intentions are paradigmatically impossible to discern5. For example, in the Genesis passage I referenced, I assumed why Joseph was pretending, which I said was intimidation. But it does not actually say that. Maybe, instead, he was traumatized by his brothers’ selling him into slavery and did not want to address it at the moment so he wanted them to believe that he was someone else. I hold my assumption because I insist that hacer como que makes the subject someone other than the action-taker and hacer como si could make either the subject.
In combination, nonexistence and intention complicate pretension into a mosaic of confusion. Think of the following common way of discussing actors and the story in series or movies. “In the real world,” we say, “Elisabeth Moss is not an oppressed woman,” or something like that. Yet, like sophisticated versions of the mask I mentioned, programs are filmed in the real world. They exist; they do not not exist. They cause real thoughts and feelings whose informational content is also real. We speak very metaphorically when it comes to speaking not just about stories’ meaningful content but their implications about the world. We might even try to clarify, “what I mean is that Mrs. Moss is not June Osborne in real life, just in the story world.” Well, in “real life” Mrs. Moss does play June Osborne, and in that sense is June Osborne. And, again, the story world exists in real life as something like the meaning we derive from engaging with the words in Atwood’s book or the series, etc. It’s not like that meaning is unreal; if it were, we wouldn’t come into mental or physical contact with it at all6.
Now, when you throw in “pretender,” meaning “to try or endeavor” in Spanish, things get even messier because there is a sense in which any time we are pretending in the sense of fabricating we are also striving for an indefinite outcome. Whenever Elisabeth Moss pretends to be a character, it is not a guarantee that we will see her as such; furthermore, whatever the outcome should be, realism or satire or cetera, it’s not guaranteed. The same goes for any lie you tell (especially—what a gamble, no?) Pretending never does not entail attempting. But, then, anything we do also seems to be something we are trying to do, since we are fallible beings—and if free will exists. After all, fake it until you make it, right? Are we not all just serial pretenders? Just until we succeed?
Unfortunately, I do not have good language at hand for whatever actually is going on here. Just that we seem confused about nonexistence and intentions when it comes to talking about pretending, and this confuses our discussions about it and translations of the word.
Para el remate, and this is purely a usage note, I have found that whenever native speakers do use fingir, they tend to use it interchangeably with hacer, as in the discussed terms and phrases, such that the dictionary’s “fingir que” is also not quite right either; instead speakers say “fingir como que.”
- I have used the New English Translation because it is what I would call a translator’s Bible. It has notes on almost every line either discussing original Greek and Hebrew syntax or just providing context justifying the translation. In addition to the Reina Valera Antigua, I also read the King James Version because I’ve heard that its poetry is elegant and indeed it is. However, I would not use the King James Version here because there is an important difference between trying to translate rather directly and creating your own work of art on the basis of a given text—for an exaggerated comparison, think of a documentary about a historical event and a film dramatization of that event. ↩︎
- My experience working on the editorial team at a science journal opened my eyes to just how political the editorial process is; about six months in the thought “ah, this must be how the Bible was written” popped into my head—perhaps less blasphemous, the politics of translation probably approximate a journal’s editorial direction. Thus, I imagine that, if the editorial process of religious texts was guided solely by providence, it is probably the case that translations of the Bible have been undertaken politically. I’ll give two brief examples here; one along the lines of my concern about whether the Bible originally depicted femininity so subserviently as recent and some current Christian traditions do and another along the lines of the major theoretical divide between conservatives and liberals in the United States.
For an example of the former, I have read that El Shaddai, a word for God originating in the Hebrew shadad, “breast,” and therefore feminine and nourishing, often translated to “God Almighty;” “the Lord” is masculine, and ‘God’ can refer to any of a variety of the Hebrew words for Yahweh, which each entail slightly different things. However, shadad is not certainly the origin of El Shaddai, so part of my project of reading the Bible is to account for which terms are used by the authors to refer to God, in which contexts, and what those words might imply about different genders, if anything. Part of my wager is that it would be very empowering and certainly more intuitive (although intuitiveness offers a somewhat weak epistemic justification) to think of God as taking on different genders in different contexts or according to the powers he’s using.
For an example of the latter, let’s take a look at what I’m finding to be the taxes vs. labor translational divide. In my memory is a vague feeling from some Christian cultures that one paradigm of Egypt’s oppressions against the Jews was that of tax collecting. Indeed, in Éxodo 1:11 of the Oso (Casiodoro’s translation), when the Israelites first started gaining population and therefore power in the view of the new Egyptian Pharaoh, who did not know Joseph (which is important because, let’s recall, Joseph had served the previous Pharaoh so well that the Pharaoh had guaranteed protection of Joseph and his people), this new Pharaoh sent tax collectors to “bother them with charges.” However, in the New English Version, translated from the source text and not the Latin Vulgate, instead of tax collectors, the new Pharaoh sends “foremen,” which seem akin to overseers—people who impose labor, not taxes. Notice how this is right in line with the political divide in today’s United States; how are those in power oppressing us, labor or taxes? And what does that entail about who is the oppressor, the rich families or the government? Although the two are not mutually exclusive in our political system so corrupted with the private sector that corporations and moneyed interests often determine what taxes are used for and, therefore, how much and when they’re taken. To let down both my conservative and progressive brethren, I have heard that the Bible’s battles are to be taken as psychoanalytic or internal; (of course metaphorically) imagine that you have an internal Pharaoh—who is he and how is he oppressing you? How and when to lead yourself out of his ordered land and into the chaotic desert, without clear direction but free from oppression?
In the course of preparing this article, I found out that the New English Translation, mentioned in the previous footnote, is designed particularly for my purposes—first published in 1996, translators approached the original source material and tried to translate it faithfully without the intervention of biases like the Latin Vulgate, replete with translators’ notes on just about each line. My current understanding is that, for many generations, we were simply translating the latest translations or biasing our translations using a panoply of versions for various reasons. I have not revised the paragraph in which this note appears because it still displays the thought process that lead to my translation of <<pretend>>.
↩︎ - Don’t believe when I say “top-down?” The Real Academia Española, publisher of the most used Spanish language dictionary, was royally chartered and receives government funding! Let’s reflect for a second on what “royal” means—pertaining to the crown, the monarch, mono:one::arche:source of power. I.e., the one source of power coming from the top (the crown).
Compare that to Webster’s Dictionary in the United States, started by a wealthy entrepreneur (wealthy enough to independently fund creation of a dictionary) Noah Webster, as he sought to differentiate American English from British English, and the variety of competing dictionaries, such as Random House, Dictionary.com, and American Heritage.
This is just one example of the ways in which Catholic societies tend to be hierarchically and centrally organized—which only makes sense, if the Church is to be made in the image of God, and society in the image of the Church.
↩︎ - My guess as to why we do not approach the language this way points to a great oxymoron. In Western culture, we are on the one hand still based in Christianity and the Bible, if not formally, in the sense that its consequences still echo after thousands of years of religious practice; on the other, we founded our modern countries in constitutions separating church and state. Since most schooling is public schooling, as all of mine has been (besides Sunday school), teachers should avoid breaking out the Bible for fear of violating that most holy of covenants—i.e., that with our government not to utter religiosity on its sacred grounds.
But it is not the teachers’ fault. We also live in a culture of oppressive centralization and measurement. Nuance is breathing its last breath if it has not already. My experience in any institution has been that everything that can be counted counts and nothing that cannot be counted counts and directives must be followed even and especially when they do not apply to a situation they have not foreseen. But that ideology does not inhere in institutionality itself; institutions are normative, yes, but they may be oriented to make anything normal, not just counting. Instead, I see this as an infection of insecurity and mistrust in our culture. If something cannot be measured, then no one can be unequivocally held accountable for it and, if so, then we must rely on our relationships with one another and trust in judgement to determine courses of action, not the written law. Which, I again emphasize, to great pushback usually when I say this in person, rules, laws, and policies cannot foresee everything, such that some situations require official action on behalf of an institution that, gasp, must be determined by the judgement of functionaries in a way that leaves them responsible for it, not the authors of the law or policymakers of the institution. But reflect for a moment on what I must be committed to when I say that. Judgement is subjective. Which means that sometimes we not only could but must rely on one another’s subjective preferences—which would not be so difficult if we’d try to trust each other for a moment. I am not naive; I do not know to what extent we may ever trust one another, when and to what extent the Bellum omnium contra omnes should ensue. But surely we are somewhere above monkeys, who cannot stand to be in a room with other monkeys they don’t know and, I hope, somewhere above where we are right now, mind numbingly putting our stock in “objectivity,” i.e., objects, someone somewhere has created.
A wonderful demonstration of my feelings about this arises in an unexpected place; in an episode of Griselda, a character, Rizi, needs a role of quarters from a bank. The teller will not give him a role of quarters to make a phone call, even in exchange for money equaling the amount of quarters, because he is not a member of the bank. So he robs her at gunpoint, taking just a role of quarters.
In a more sympathetic example, you, I imagine, have gotten into a scenario in an app or website in which it is not accommodating your needs or is simply broken and the 2-5 options for fixes it offers in the help section tell you to do something you are already doing, to no effect; if you are like me, immigration law or policy has blocked you or a family member from visiting one another, even though it seemed designed for a different situation, which you explained to a functionary who said “rules are rules,” as if the purported rule or policy were the bearer of all possible future truths. You know, like the Bible. We are worshipping the wrong things and ideas is what I’m saying. On a global scale, it seems to be eroding our trust in one another. In the case of language learning, it is hindering our ability to learn or progress.
I am not naive to the opposite dynamic constituting a sort of ménage à trois—that perhaps a teacher would avoid the wrath of a given religious community for potentially misplaced interpretation; different even still, that the teacher should respect the often personal nature of religious journey.
↩︎ - I used to qualify the idea that intentions are paradigmatically difficult to discern by saying that the intentions of others are difficult to discern. However, just as the knife cannot cut itself and the eyes cannot see themselves, I doubt that the mind can fully grasp it or the mind-body’s intentions. Like eyes in a mirror, the mind might find helpful representations of itself but likely not gather all of its intentions all of the time, which is also temporally limited—should you really even delve into the depths of your intentions enough to be able to articulate them? Could you not die before finishing that quest or stunt your progress towards your intentions at best? I will raise another helpful metaphor. The sports player does not stop to plan his intentions at every moment. Perhaps we are meant to live our lives like the sports player plays her sport.
↩︎ - This is something like the sum of the problems of alterity and indeterminacy. Nothing we can perceive or conceive of (i.e., “determine”) is truly other to us. The issue is not quite alterity, because that’s just the otherness in contrast with which we define some phenomenon. Think of an ongoing debate in hip hop in which one school of thought holds that a song or artist or his music is not considered “black” to the extent that white people like the aura or songs. The metaphor of nonexistence or unreality works in much the same way; nothing is nonexistent or unreal to the extent that we can coherently discuss it.
But the issue is also not indeterminacy because that’s just the problem of information loss in describing a phenomenon (which I have referred to else where as transmission failure or transmission vs. absorption—the mechanism of description is never the thing which it describes, nor does it absorb it, so a lot gets lost in the representation/transmission). I suppose that I must sustain a somewhat controversial position, that once you have language to describe something, that something either physically exists or the language refers to information or both, but that no coherent piece of language fails to refer. However controversial, it follows intuitively from an understanding of alterity applied to metaphysics or ontology instead of its usual application in anthropology or cultural studies. ↩︎
