083. The Fattest [Largest] Lies (Las Mentiras Más Gordas)
A very capricious king, who was busy everyday thinking of extravagances (outlandish acts), gave the strangest (rarest) of all orders in the world. He gave order to announce to all within his kingdom that he would marry the princess, his daughter, to the person who was capable of telling the fattest [biggest] lies.
As this world has the misfortune of having few who always tell the truth, it is full of lies and liars, with aspirants to the hand of the king’s daughter presented themselves in his palace in such number that he had no means to shelter and feed them all while they waited for their turns.
They told the biggest lies that they could conceive, but the king accepted none of them as his son-in-law, saying that he was fed up from listening to those little lies that they foisted on him at all hours one after another, that they were not worthy of the prize that a king as important as himself wanted to bestow. The prize was so big, said the king, that the lies must be, at the very least, be proportional to its importance.
For quite some time, this matter was the talk of the entire kingdom. So much so that one day it got to a modest hut of a small village lost [hidden away] in the mountain, where a very clever boy lived miserably [e.g. in poverty] with his widowed mother.
The boy asked his mother for permission to go to the palace and the mother granted this, gave him her blessing and what little they had left to eat as snack for the road.
So the boy, spirited and calm, set out [for his journey] and after a few days arrived at the palace and asked to see the king. By now the king was so fed up with hearing little lies that he told the boy as soon as he saw him:
– Speak and give me some really fat [big] lies, because if you come to me with little lies like those others, I will give you punishments instead of the [promised] reward.
And the boy began:
– If your majesty listen carefully, you will see what had happened to me. My father was a man who was very fond of fishing in the air, high up on the tree. One day he was high up on a gigantic holm oak that was in our town, cast his fishing rod into the air, far away, and immediately he noticed that there was a great weight at the the other end of the line. I helped him pull because the weight was enormous, and [on] holding the fish hook, we removed seven donkeys and two rams. My father was satisfied with this catch and put away his fishing rod for that day. As he did not want to carry only the donkeys home, we searched for an anthill, skinned fourteen ants, tanned their skin right there and filled them with honey until they burst.
[Note: the original text is “Como no quería llevar a los burros de vacío a casa, buscamos un hormiguero, …”, where I am unsure of how to translate “los burros de vacío”]
>> As the [ants’] skin were very big and heavy, the donkeys’ back were flayed from carrying them and I had to take them to a veterinarian. The veterinarian ordered us to put poultices made out of cooked beans on the donkeys. I did that and, to my surprise on seeing them the next day, discovered that a bush of beans so large and thick came out from the butt of each donkey, so that I picked up one hundred bushels of fat beans from each.
>> I did not not what to do with so much beans, but I found out that they were selling them for a good price because beans were not grown in the area that year, so that I went to sell them in a nearby town and they exchanged them by weight in gold.
>> In one of those towns where I passed by, I saw a group of men who toiled, sweaty and hard at work, to roll a quail egg with the help of a lever. They exchanged the egg for fifty bushels of beans and I brought it back to my aunt to put it with a brooding hen that she had. As soon as she put it under the hen, a sprout came out that in just a few minutes became a tree with wings; and the tree began to flap its wings and rose upward at full speed; it grew and grew and in a short time it reached the sky. I climbed the tree’s branches above its trunk and also got to the sky, but I found a strange thing in that place.
>> Then Saint Pedro came out to see what was happening, and as soon as I saw him, I asked him about my uncle, who lived in the street of the cobblers. Saint Pedro told me that he was at the merchant square, selling the watermelons that he had made from his shoe factory the day before. So I came down from the sky to talk to my uncle and…
– Enough, enough, enough! – shouted the king – Do not continue because there will be no other on earth capable of telling lies larger than yours. You have won the reward and you will marry my daughter with only one condition: from now on out you will not tell another lie in your life.
And those who knew him said that he kept his word, he married the king’s daughter and, just as he had never told a lie before, he never again told another.
—– VOCABULARY —–
Afanarse – (to labor) to toil, to do everything one can, to make an effort
Aficionado – (enthusiastic follower) fan, enthusiast, lover, aficionado; (nonprofessional) amateur
Anzuelo – (tool for fishing) fish hook, hook; (trap) bait
Caña – (hollow stem) cane, reed; (for fishing) rod; (upper part of boot) leg
Caprichoso – (inconstant) capricious; (arbitrary) whimsical, fanciful
Carnero – (animal) ram; (culinary) mutton
Cataplasma – (medicine) poultice; (tiresome person) bore
Catorce – fourteen
Choza – hut, shack
Clueca – (animal) broody
Cobijar – (to house) to give shelter to, to take in (in one’s home); (to provide protection) to shelter, to protect
Codorniz – quail
Comidilla – (gossip) talk
Concebir – (to devise) to conceive; (to understand) to conceive of, to imagine, to comprehend
Conceder – (to bestow) to give, to grant, to award (a prize); (to acknowledge) to admit, to concede
Confín – (frontier) boundary, border, limit; (remote part) edge, confine
Conformarse – to be satisfied with, to be happy with
Contornos – (periphery) outskirts, environs, surrounding area; contorno – (silhouette) outline; (geography) contour
Cuadrilla – (set of people) bunch, group; (group of workers) gang, team
Culo – butt, bottom
Curtir – (leatherworking) to tan; (to darken) to tan, to bronze; (to toughen up) to harden
Desgracia – (ill fortune) misfortune, bad luck; (instance of bad luck) tragedy, disaster; (state of dishonor) disgrace
Desollarse – (to take the skin off) to skin, to graze
Despellejar – (to remove the skin from) to skin; (to criticize) to tear to pieces
Digno – (deserving) worthy, worth
Encina – holm oak
Endilgar – (to force to put up with) to saddle with, to foist on; (to deliver) to give, to land
Extravagancia – (outlandish act) eccentricity; (outlandishness) extravagance
Fábrica – (industrial complex) factory, plant, mill
Frondoso – (abundant in growth) lush, luxuriant, dense, thick; (having many leaves) leafy
Haba – (legume) broad bean, bean; (veterinary) tumor
Harto de – (annoyed with) fed up with, tired of
Hilo – (strand) thread, yarn (for knitting); (thin metal cord) wire; (small amount of liquid) trickle
Hormiga – (insect) ant; (person) hard worker
Hormiguero – ant’s nest, anthill
Lomo – (anatomy) back (of an animal), lower back (of a human); (culinary) loin; (book) spine
Mata – (shrubbery) bush, shrub; (cluster of plants or trees) tuft, thicket, clump
Mentir – (to tell a falsehood) to lie
Mentirijillas – fibbing
Mentiroso – (someone who lies) liar; (deceitful) lying, liar
Merienda – (light meal) snack
Nacer – (to develop) to sprout, to grow
Palanca – (mechanics) lever, crowbar; (favor) influence, leverage
Pesca – (action) fishing, angling (with a fishing rod); (fish caught) catch
Premio – (honor) prize, award
Rara – (unusual) weird, strange, odd; (scarce or exceptional) rare
Relleno – (culinary) stuffing, filling; (extra details) padding
Reventar – (to break with pressure) to burst; (to explode) to blow up, to shatter (glass)
Rodar – (to spin) to roll, to go round, to turn; (film) to shoot, to film
Sandías – watermelons
Sudoroso – sweaty
Trepar – (to ascend something) to climb, to scale; (to grow) to climb
Vacío – (unoccupied) empty, vacant; (frivolous) shallow
Viudo – widow, widowed
Yerno – son-in-law
Zapatero – cobler (mender); shoemaker (manufacturer);