ON SEPTEMBER 12, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo published a wide-ranging interview with Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, prominent conservative activist, and Karl Rove ally. It was a long interview, presented in a traditional Q & A format. You can go to El Mundo‘s website, access the interview, and find Norquist saying this (in Spanish):
Or at least that’s how another news outlet, Agence France-Presse, translated the Spanish into English. And it took no time at all for publications like the New Republic and Slate to jump on Norquist’s incendiary language. Whereupon Norquist denied the whole thing. Sort of.
What Norquist denied was that he had used the word “anti-American.” “I did not say that any generation in American history is anti-American,” he told AFP on September 22. “I didn’t say it.” He told Slate‘s Timothy Noah and June Thomas that Pablo Pardo, the author of the El Mundo interview, “took his understanding of a paraphrase of what he thinks I was saying, then he wrote it up in his own words.”
In its follow-up piece, AFP reported that Norquist “was trying to secure a tape of the interview.” And Slate, too, said it was trying to locate Pardo and listen to the recording, if one exists.
Well, one does. THE WEEKLY STANDARD sat down with Pardo (an occasional contributor) and listened to it on Tuesday afternoon. And, what’s more, Norquist is right. He never said the World War II generation “defended anti-American policies.” However, he did say that the World War II “age cohort,” to use his phrase, promoted “un-American” policies.
The El Mundo interview took place in late August, prior to the Republican National Convention, when Pardo interviewed Norquist in Americans for Tax Reform’s Washington, DC, offices. According to Pardo’s tape recording of the interview, the reporter started off by asking Norquist who will win this year’s presidential election.
Norquist replied, “Well, you can argue it both ways.” And he continued:
Norquist went on:
. . . at which point Norquist was interrupted by staff members. When the interview resumed, the conservative activist explained how, even though around 1 million Democrats have died since the 2000 election, John Kerry might still win.
So, where did the AFP quote come from? It is an accurate translation into English of what appeared in El Mundo in Spanish. And it should be said that if you take something uttered in English, then translate it into Spanish, and then have a third party translate the result back into English, you are probably not going to end up with what you started with. Still, it does look like Pardo paraphrased the locquacious Norquist, and then put his paraphrases in quotes. For instance, nowhere in the interview does Norquist say members of the Greatest Generation “are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying.” When I asked Pardo about this on Tuesday, he said simply, “that’s mine.”
Pardo also points out that you cannot translate “un-American” directly into Spanish. He uses the Collins English/Spanish dictionary, 1980 edition, in which “un-American”–Norquist’s phrase–is translated as “antiamericano”–the word Pardo used in his El Mundo piece. Of course, all this may be a distinction without a difference: the American Heritage Dictionary defines “un-American” as “considered contrary to the institutions or principles of the United States,” which sounds a lot like . . . well, “anti-American.”
Correction appended. The original version of this transcript read “one side spits off” instead of “one-size-fits-all”.
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
