Travel guides new and old

I love reading travel guides. I've bought several in preparation for my upcoming trip to Argentina, and I've pretty well cleaned out the public library's shelf. (Good news for those planning their own trips: I leave at the end of the month, and all books will be returned.) The university library has just one book specifically on Rosario, where I'll be teaching: a pamphlet titled Rosario: Argentina's Second City published by the Pan American Union in 1925. The emphasis is on commerce and modern development, with the occasional flight of fancy: "With ocean and river craft of all descriptions anchored for several miles along the water front, with sailors and river boatmen speaking varied languages, handling cargoes curious and interesting, a commercial picture is presented that merits the attention of a gifted painter." 

Most of the photographs, however, are of buildings--mostly banks, solid, blocky, and imposing. Certain details, though, do connect with my current translation project, such as a mention of the Jockey Club or a photo of palm trees on Blvd. Oroño. I've found mentions of the latter in travel books as well, and I'm looking forward to seeing the "real" haunts of the fictional characters whose adventures I've been rewriting into English.

I'll be teaching a course called Translating Argentina, using translation as a lens through which to consider cross-cultural experience and adaptation. We'll read some Borges, some Cortázar, some Gambaro. We'll read travel books and local advertisements. 

We'll all be translating ourselves, my students and I, rewriting ourselves into another language, another cultural context, introducing ourselves to new people, and then rewriting whatever adventures--or misadventures--we might have back into English, to tell our friends back home. Rethinking an experience in more than one language, I think, inserts a distance that encourages reflection--an opening, a necessary pause to think. The cheerful boosterism of the 1925 pamphlet reminds me, too, that whatever I might find in Argentina will be just one moment, open to reinterpretation over time as well.

Bored as an oyster?

Razor clam, boredom long past

The translation I'm working on includes the phrase, aburrirse como pingüinos-- become bored as penguins? A little sleuthing around turned up the phrase, aburrirse como una ostra or una almeja-- bored as an oyster, or bored as a clam. Bivalves likely lead pretty dull lives (though a razor clam can burrow down 24 inches in less than a minute which, allowing for scale, is faster than many bipeds can travel). A new phrase for me, but evidently a perfectly common way of saying "bored to tears" or "bored to death." Bored silly, bored stiff, bored beyond belief, bored out of one's mind--there's quite a variety of ways to say it in English. My guess would be lots of bored people, looking for colorful ways to complain. Based on the lists I've assembled so far, Spanish seems to have more "bored as an [x]" comparisons, while English speakers seem more likely to be bored into or out of a state or condition.

Idioms are a challenge--to teach, to translate, let alone to employ with any grace in one's own speech. One of my favorite moments from my college Spanish classes was when the exasperated professor, faced with a student's protest--"I'd never say it like that!"--responded drily, "Fortunately, the language is not limited to what you would or would not say." I think we were talking about heartbreak.

But about those penguins. In context, it's a variation on a common theme; the reader of the original would have the standard idiom in her repertoire, and notice the shift. Recognizable yet unexpected. I haven't quite worked out how to preserve that wrinkle in the English, though I'm thinking I might keep the penguins, just for fun. 

I'm seldom bored, but I'll be looking for ways to work the oyster's ennui into conversation.

Cookbooks--a translator's best friend

Maybe I just tend to translate books full of food, even elaborate meals (the Virgin's Jubilee breakfast in La Virgen Pipona/The Potbellied Virgin being a favorite example) but I have found, mostly by chance, that international cookbooks provide a wealth of information for the translator. Plenty of ingredients--herbs, spices, cuts of meat--have straightforward parallels across languages, but many do not. Prepared dishes can be harder to indentify, and a lush, full-color illustration of the finished stew or conserve can be invaluable. Pictures can be especially helpful in a monolingual, source-language cookbook-- so that's what they're eating! Then there are the multi-lingual glossaries, the explanations of staples and procedures that might be daunting to a cook unfamiliar with the cuisine described. 

Not to be overlooked: the tangential fun of reading cookbooks. So many wonderful dishes to imagine without all the tedious chopping. One of my favorites carries a blurb that proclaims it a MUST for the bookshelf of any serious cook. I'm not really a serious cook. Grim, maybe, heating bean and cheese tortillas at a gallop before fencing classes or recorder lessons. But I like to dabble. Imaginary cooking requires little skill and only modest self-control to keep the snacking demons in check. And if I finally identify an elusive pastry, it even counts as work, not woolgathering.

I suppose it's a matter of seeing "dictionary" in the broadest possible sense--the plant books I've mentioned before, compendia of mythological creatures and little-known saints, forgotten movie reviews. Today's library trip had a specific goal: cookbooks from or about Argentina. There weren't too many in my local library but there were, I hope, just enough to get the characters through their breakfasts and on with the story. Maybe I'll even try cooking a new dish or two in preparation.

Argentina Count-Down (part 1)

I picked up a 6-week, inter-library loan on campus the other day, and the return date was none other than my departure date for Argentina. Aack! I've got as many to-do lists as a woman could wish for, but checking things off the lists is proving harder. So the packing/planning/copying/reserving/panicking begins in earnest. I spent half the morning today in front of the department photocopier, putting together a course packet that I could then scan and email to myself. But the scan was too big and the email never arrived, so I'll have to scan it again, part I and part II. I spent yesterday evening poring over guidebooks and web sites looking for weather information, needing to answer that all-important question: what should we pack? With different parts of the family heading in different directions at different times this fall, we're counting suitcases and wondering what can be borrowed, what must be bought. I'm a big believer in taking far less clothing and way more money than you think you'll need on any given trip; I have almost never wished I had more stuff to cart around. Still, we hate to be caught short, without the crucial book/tool/sweater that would make everything run smoothly.

It's also important to leave some room in the luggage for the trip home. Souvenirs, presents, paraphernalia-- call it what you will (I like the terms "research materials" and "realia for teaching purposes," both of which sound more purposeful than the "ephemera" we used to sell at the used bookstore where I worked in college). I'm already daydreaming about book shopping in Buenos Aires and Rosario. When we returned from our year in Ecuador in 1980, my parents would station one kid at each pile of luggage, then ferry suitcases and bundles from one to the next. That trip, we were bringing home gorgeous hand-tinted photographs, a huge wheel of cheese, copious research notes, the usual clothes and books, and two blow-guns. 

Easy to take along: virtual reading material in the form of links to favorite blogs. I've added a list of a few I enjoy reading, with more to follow. Do have a look if you haven't read them yet and, in a comment, take a moment to mention your own favorites that I might have missed.

Globe Oranges -- a story

Many years ago, a student arrived on the first day of class with a very small infant in her arms. When her turn came to introduce herself, she said she had studied in [country x] for a semester and come back with a little [country-xian]. Which got me thinking. . .  and marked one of the first steps toward a short story I wrote sometime later. "Globe Oranges" was published in Bellingham Review in 2004. It's only tangentially about study abroad, but it is about maps, and how we understand the world, and words, and what we can make for one another. Click here to read the whole story. It's not brand new, but it's one that's stayed with me.


--Thanks to the editors of Bellingham Review for their initial hospitality.

My Grandmother's Dictionary Stand

My grandfather was a woodworker, and one of the things he built for my grandmother was a dictionary stand. It has shelves for smaller books and a hinged, inclined top to hold a large book open. In their different ways, my grandparents both loved words. My grandfather was a storyteller who regaled guests at our wedding with a cautionary tale about doing a post-mortem on a dead calf en route to a dance when he and my grandmother were still newlyweds (we married on their 56^th anniversary). My grandmother was a reader and a writer of long, many-paged letters on yellow legal pads, letters that spread into the margins and around the corners and occasionally onto the envelopes. 

When my grandmother died, I received the dictionary stand. It is a perfect piece of furniture. It carries for me family legacies of wordsmithing and of making things by hand--and it is darned useful. It holds books I've had for years, close to hand. The fat dictionary that came with the stand is opened far more frequently than it would ever be on an ordinary shelf. The stand holds the first Spanish-English dictionary I bought in college, at the recommendation of a professor who became a mentor and good friend.

I use online dictionaries. I go to the library and use big, fat, old printed dictionaries. There are new editions of some of my dictionaries, and I covet those. But adding new entries generally means letting some fall by the wayside--for instance, the most recent Pequeño Larousse ilustrado no longer has a full page of fencing diagrams. So I want to add to my collection, not replace anything. From a practical standpoint, translators need old dictionaries as well as new: not everything we work on was written last night. And dictionaries, like other books, also accumulate the marks of reading, and that's important, too.

I'm working on a new translation project today, so out comes that Spanish-English dictionary, and by chance I find a pencil underlining from a previous project. I'm surprised I remember--it's just a little squiggle under the word--except that it was a word in one of the many proverbs included in The Potbellied Virgin, proverbs that were both a challenge and a puzzle. Those proverbs have left their traces, too. I think I'm more inclined to look for proverbs and sayings since working on that novel, both to use them and just to think about them. Certain sayings and favorite words become part of a family's legacy as well. My husband and children, who otherwise speak no German, have all learned one of my other grandmother's favorite sayings. I tuck it, in spirit, onto my dictionary stand along with the books.

Drawing a Face on the Balloon

My son brought a balloon home from school with him this week, bright yellow. He played punching bag with it, he made obnoxious noises with it, he bounced it against the ceiling and retrieved it again. The first night, he drew a face on it. Last night, he added hair. 

My bedtime reading last night was "More Than Gone," the first story in Ethel Rohan's collection, Cut Through the Bone. (I haven't read the rest of the book yet.) "More Than Gone" is about a widow who carries a balloon home after a child's birthday party. The balloon may be company of a sort, or another sign of absence, or both. And it gets a face, too. 

The other books I read this week were Room, by Emma Donoghue, and Voltaire's Calligrapher, by Pablo de Santis (translated by Lisa Carter).  I read the first third of Room and was hardly able to sleep, my mind running circles after Jack in his routines. What I most admire in the novel is the consistency of voice and of perspective. Donoghue's creation of a language for Jack--precocious in some ways, limited in others--is wholly persuasive, and absorbing. (There are balloons in Room, too.) And the world created is both real and unreal.

With my students, I've been reading short stories, rounding out the survey course as the term winds down--"Talpa," by Juan Rulfo, and "Los funerales de la Mamá Grande," by Gabriel García Márquez. Since one of the most common questions I get, if I happen to mention that I teach Latin American literature, is "Oh, do you work on García Márquez," I asked the class how many had read any of his work before. Not many, as it happened. A few hands went up, but only halfway. It's a big class, and some of them are shy. But more than that, they weren't sure if their reading counted: a number of them had read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but they hadn't read Cien años de soledad. "Only in English," one of them mumbled. Meaning, I read it, but I didn't really.

Gregory Rabassa's translation both is and is not García Márquez's novel.

Part of what continues to draw me to translation (as translator and as reader) is that unresolved tension, the copies of copies that both overlap and diverge. Voltaire's Calligrapher is a book continually preoccupied with copies, simulacra, masks, disguise, imitation. (Also, a serendipitous addition to my Argentina reading challenge list.)  No balloons there, but the company of reproductions that both shelter and betray their originals.

Presence and absence and empathy, even if illusory, and that squeaky marker sound drawing a face on a squishy balloon:  more reasons I read.