Iban por lana.

I discovered that the Godard movie Bande à part/Band of Outsiders, normally untranslated in Spanish, was marketed in Mexico as Iban por lana, ‘They went for wool,’ which confused me, so I did some digging and discovered this was an allusion to a saying “ir por lana y volver trasquilado” (‘to go for wool and return shorn’), which Oxford translates as “to be hoist by one’s own petard” and Harper-Collins as “get more than one bargained for.” Not a bad title, if you ask me (see Foreign Films, English Titles for more). Lagniappe: the word trasquilar ‘shear’ is a prefixed form of esquilar, “from Old Spanish esquirar, from Gothic *𐍃𐌺𐌰𐌹𐍂𐌰𐌽 (*skairan), from Proto-Germanic *skeraną,” so it’s a cognate of English shear. I did not see that coming.

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