Words lost in translation

I really feel sad for you all native speakers that in English the word “madrugada” doesn’t exist. You have early morning, deep into nighttime, at daybreak, etc, but not a word for the concept of those hours between 1 am and 5-6 am where everything is dark and the night seems endless, and people are still around in the streets walking or talking or driking and dancing at weekends and summer-nights. For the hours of working or studying so late you end up with raccon eyes, and the silence deep when you look out of your window before finally going to bed.

“Madrugar” with the same root, is a verb that means to make an early morning, that is, to wake up very soon, sooner than normal or than it is reasonable. But “la madrugá” comes before that. It’s its own delimited space.

English has a weird word for the hours between the fall of the sun and dinner, “Evening”, that in Spanish simply doesn’t exist either. It’s directly from “tarde” (afternoon) to “noche” (night) although sometimes you can hear “tarde-noche” for when in winter the sun comes down at 5-6 pm just with “la merienda” (mid-afternoon meal, like a breakfast but for afternoons) and dinner still doesn’t happen until 10 pm.

In the same way you all live life in a way that make “evening” an useful word, we in Spain (dunno other spanish-speaking countries, just talking for mine) talk about the madrugada and we meant activity late into the night that is understood in a context by other spaniards that in English is completely absent. It’s strange.

All of this, of course, because I wanted to start a tumblr post with “Es de madrugá donde vivo y aún estoy aquí…”