RE: Argentina, Iraq (Spanish with a note for Anglophones)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Tom:

<<"El eslogan del Palacio San Martín podría sintetizarse 'estar en
contra el uso de la fuerza en Irak, más allá de que el Consejo de
Seguridad lo termine bendiciendo'. [...]"

The slogan from San Martin's Palace can be summed up as "to be against
the use of force in Iraq, whether or not the Security Council ends up
giving it its blessing.

Just checked the dictionary, which has mas alla as meaning "beyond" the
extent to which it gives its blessing, which is how I'd understood it.
So it wouldn't that just mean "we won't support force beyond what the UN
endorses"?>>


*****

Juan is right over Tom here. 'Más allá' indeed means 'beyond'
(literally, 'more over there'), but the structure of the clause it
introduces - specifically, given the preceding comma and the following
non-specific relative pronoun 'que' - means that 'más allá' means
'beyond' in the sense not of 'beyond' a certain level of force that may
be decided by the Security Council but that the whole question of the
level of force that may be decided by the Security Council lies 'beyond'
the parameters of the preceding clause. A translation that followed the
original text more closely could thus render 'más allá de que' in this
sense as 'irrespective of', 'regardless of', 'independently of', or some
such, giving the last part of the quoted sentence as '... irrespective
of what the Security Council may end up giving its blessing to.'

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