Michael: The Emperor What?

The silent flashes;
White against the somber sky,
Are the souls we’ve lost.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

A lot of food wrappers list ingredients in both English and Spanish which makes it easy to see that not many cereals or crackers are sold here that don’t have sugar. The only cereals I’ve found here that don’t have sugar or corn syrup added comes from the states; Bob’s Red Mill granolas and mueslis. The only cracker without sugar comes from a company called Bioland (Reminds me of Soylent Green.) based in Costa Rica.

Sometimes the words on the labels are written in such a small font, it doesn’t matter what language they’re written in, I can’t tell what the ingredients are. That’s the case with Emperador cookies. The cookies I’m occasionally experimenting with as a sugar source for long bike rides and runs.

But it’s not what I can’t read, or whether it has sugar or corn syrup (No doubt sugar since it doesn’t come from an American company.). It’s the easily visible slogan that has me frazzled and a little disappointed.

The slogan is, “Para ese Emperador que llevas dentro.” Such a simple sentence, and after a year of living here, I thought I ought to be able to understand it. But I don‘t.

“For this emperor,” what…keys (llaves), tires(lantas), leave(llevar)…? And “dentro” sounds familiar, but I had no clue.

I thought I knew what “llevas” meant because at the panaderias they always ask us if we want it “para llevar” - to go.  But looking at it in writing without the embellishments of human dialogue and I was just about clueless.

 The dictionary I have says “Dentro” means “inside”.

 Now with that information, I figure it goes something like, “For this Emperor, it’s what’s inside.” But I know that’s not quite right. Where does “llevas” come in? Maybe it’s, “ For this Emperor, it’s what goes inside.” But is it referring to me as the emperor, and I should be proud to eat this cookie? Or is the cookie referring to itself and is proud to have the industrial crème sandwiched inside it?

For now and for quite some time to come, I believe, “ For this dufus, Spanish is going to be a tough nut to crack.” And I hope that doesn‘t make any sense at all translated into Spanish.