Eduardo Alvarez
Updated Saturday, March 9, 2024-02:24
Dancing Queen Doña Sofía, the queen of the dance floor at Marta Urquijo's wedding
Vegetarian diet Pablo de Grecia, the man for whom Queen Sofía stopped eating meat
It is such a terrible loneliness of the soul
not to understand a language
, to be alone in a country without understanding its language." This statement of regret
is attributed to Queen
Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg,
wife of
Alfonso XIII. The Englishwoman arrived in our country in 1906 without
even knowing Spanish.
It would take her time to be able to find out what the Court said about her in the language of Cervantes, almost all things that would not exactly please her ears.
The same could be said to have happened to Princess Sofia of Greece when
she married
the then Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, the son of the Barcelona family, in 1962.
She also did not know a word of Spanish
at the time the wedding was announced. link.
But the daughter of the Hellenic kings was very clear from the beginning that
she had to make every effort
, and in the shortest possible time, to become familiar with the language of what was going to become her new homeland.
All this is relevant due to the
quite unfair criticism
that Doña Sofía received days ago for the speech she gave on the occasion of receiving the Gold Medal of the Balearic Islands.
Felipe VI's mother was probably not affected by the general darts of
tweeters,
aware that today the networks are that immense
neighborhood patio
where we enjoy skinning each other to our hearts' content.
But it would have hurt Queen Sofía, as LOC has learned, that some prominent
opinion makers
have taken advantage of the controversy to
insinuate that her poor Spanish
would confirm her
lack of interest in the country
of which she has been Consort for almost four decades.
"I want to thank you for the honor
that this award represents for me," began Doña Sofía, who seemed
very uncomfortable in front of the lectern
where she read a short speech in front of the regional authorities.
She stumbled over several words and had real difficulty
following what she put on the page.
And this immediately caused many to come out in a rush to say categorically that "the person who was Queen of Spain for 40 years
does not know Spanish."
But that is not the reality.
The wife of Juan Carlos I, despite the institutional role that she has assumed throughout her life,
has always had quite a bit of stage fright
, that is, she has been characterized by getting very nervous when it was her turn to speak in public.
Her speeches have been quite rare, in fact, over time.
And the
lack of fluidity in her oratory
, the
inability to improvise
and the tension of having to face an audience are logically exacerbated by
her advanced age.
How can we not remember, in this context, the agonizing reading of Don Juan Carlos's speech at the Military Easter of 2014, a few months before his abdication, in which
he suffered as much with his hesitations
as those who listened to him without knowing where to look
Doña Sofía grew up speaking
mainly English and German
, which were the languages in which the family communicated
behind closed doors
.
They are her natural languages, and it is no secret that her most common conversations are in Shakespearean slang.
Even learning
Greek would come later.
But of course
she knows Spanish,
although she has never been able to express herself without a
strong foreign accent
.
And for her personal satisfaction, she took care to
master spelling
.
Queen Letizia during her speech on rare diseasesGTRES
What
today's Emerita
never cultivated was
oratory, expressiveness, and naturalness
when speaking in public.
Among other reasons, because these are qualities that until very recently
were not valued
among
members of royalty,
as they were considered unnecessary, especially when it came not to the holder of the Crown but to
his
consort .
Doña Sofía is no exception in this sense among the royals of her generation.
Nothing to do with the demand in this area that all members of royal families have today.
And if all
comparisons are odious
, in this case any parallel between the communication skills of Doña Sofía and her daughter-in-law Queen Letizia is
as unfair as it is absurd
.
The wife of Felipe VI is a
journalism professional
, and specifically
audiovisual media
.
And it is good that her oratory capacity is exploited precisely to reinforce her role and increase her projection as a Consort.
Her brilliant speech
about
rare diseases,
one of the causes to which she is most committed, received a
flood of praise.
Something similar to what happened with her intervention to congratulate the TVE program
Informe Semanal for its 50 years of broadcast.
In reality, Doña Letizia has been letting herself go for a long time at public events in which she can
openly act as a journalist queen.