Today's word harvest: three new trees

Ceibo

Sapo game

Today we crossed the Rosario-Victoria bridge (long bridge over the Paraná river, longer causeway across the wetlands) to Estancia "El Cerrito" for asado (barbeque), a folklore show (with audience participation dancing at the end), some fierce games of sapo (coin toss with a bronze toad's gaping maw as target) and lots of lazing around in the sun or shade, depending on preference.

Ombú

And I learned three new trees today: Ceibo, Ombú, and Paraíso (Paradise). Trees I'd read about--the first two, anyway--but hadn't seen or identified. Our friendly hostess shared a number of other plant names with me, but I can evidently retain only a few at a time. I learned the Palo Borracho's name the other day, though I'd been taking pictures of it for a while. The trunk looks swollen (source of borracho--drunk?), with thick spines, then nips in almost as if collared before the branches spread, but the fiber inside the seedpods is incredibly fine and silky.

Ceibo-- Argentina's national flower

Paraíso. Kids call the seeds--loose skins, hard pits--
"venenitos" (that is, poison). They're popular,
and painful, additions to Carnival water balloons.

Palo borracho

Palo borracho seed pod

I also saw tantalizingly varied birds out the bus window: Lots of herons, but also one that looked like a long-beaked storks. Huge, fat raptors of some kind, eagle-sized, some flying, some perched, some waddling. With a kind of crest on the head, I think. But, of course, traveling too fast to be sure. Will have to try to get closer another time. Unidentified birds, plenty of cattle, lots of sunshine. My eyes are still prickling a little from the glare.

Trust me. Birds abound.

As do cattle.

Juxtaposition (compare and contrast)

When the program excursion to Buenos Aires (several weeks ago now) visited the Recoleta Cemetery, I was struck by the "Make a Wish" billboard framed at the end of one of the narrow paths--streets, in a sense--that crisscross the cemetery. Well off hallowed ground, but present in its visibility, a foil to the wishes expressed in the elaborate tombs: wishes for status, for immortality, for some tangible way to communicate to the dead how intensely they were missed, and loved. And life goes on, visible in cobwebs and bromeliads and the crowds of tourists with cameras.

I've been thinking about juxtapositions, including those visual juxtapositions, reflections. Thinking them in Spanish and in English. Maybe because reflejo (in a mirror) and reflexión (thoughts, considerations) are two I still have to think about too often, afraid I'll mark my thoughtful interventions as mere wavery mirror preening. Also because yuxtaposición is fun to say in Spanish, the x a little softer, the y a somehow more welcoming glide into the word. But more because being here, out of my usual context, invites reflection, comparison, the hey, what's that? reflex of the photographer. And I've been enjoying reflections in café windows and mirrored office blocks while feeling stymied by the reflections in ferry windows that prevented my recording the not-too-interesting view of acres of brown river water with no shore in sight. No great loss, right? But when you can't get the shot you want, you're sure you're missing something. 

Yuxtaposición/Juxtaposition: a winner for Scrabble in either language, but hard to pull off, being so long. Maybe I'm really thinking about repetition, the repetition intrinsic to memory and to theater, the same only different, again and again and again. 

Teatro Solís

A highlight of my trip to Montevideo was Oyster, a performance by the Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollack Dance Company (Israel). [Watch a tantalizing little clip here.] Why juxtaposition? Because of the unexpected combinations of music and movement, the odd wigs, the humor, the extraordinary postures, the color. Because of the new of their performance (with all its nods toward older performance traditions) against the grand old Teatro Solís, all gold paint and red velvet. Because it was just so wonderful, I want to tell everyone.

A few more I've collected recently:

Ramblas, Montevideo, Sunday morning

City beach, dune (re)generation

There's a parrot in this shrub, if you can find it.

So as not to have to read the same things twice--
Not sure I get the logic here.

Birdwatching for Translators

I was asked recently when on this trip I had particularly felt I was somewhere else. Well, running, last Friday.

It was a gray, cold, drizzly morning with a strong wind, easily run-in-a-fleece weather; a day worthy of Michigan at the end of March (remember, we just celebrated the first day of spring). The wind was stronger by the river, and stronger yet as I turned back and realized I had had it behind me; the rain stung my face and my ears. The river looked brown, as usual, but high and choppy.

Then I saw a tero. Two, actually. I recognized them by appearance, not by name (those who know me can testify I'm no ornithologist), and I recognized their appearance because I'd been looking at photographs.

When I first read the sentence in the book I'm translating --he looked like a tero-- I had no idea. It could have been anything: a kind of rodent, a local bogeyman, an aristocratic dandy. It took some dictionary rummaging, a trail from a more local name to a more general name to a comparison of photographs to settle on the English. Tero to Teruteru to Southern Lapwing.

It was bumpy ground, rough grass and not-quite-park just where the construction site started. The two men I usually see practicing Tai Chi (always on the danger side of the keep-back sign meant to protect the unwary from the eroding bluffs) were posed in the distance. I was pulling my cold hands further into my sleeves when the dark, trailing crest at the back of a bird's head caught my eye. And I thought, I really am somewhere else now. 

[photo via Wikipedia]

Does it help the translation? Change it?  

It did push me toward using the local name, not the English name of the bird. Wikipedia will tell you about the Tero in Spanish or the Southern Lapwing in English. Lapwing now seems too domesticating (and, perhaps contradictorily, needlessly distancing; the reader who doesn't know her birds won't know a southern lapwing from a cedar waxwing). Also, to me, lapwing sounds somehow more fluid in its movements, not poking and jumping on the ground like the birds I saw, longish-legged and knobby-kneed, like miniature heron relations. But will the reader know a tero is a bird if I don't add other pointers?

It's still a work-in-progress. For now, I've got both names in the draft.

First Day of Spring

Podrán cortar todas las flores pero no acabarán con la primavera
--they can cut all the flowers but they won't do away with spring--

Lapachos in bloom

I wonder how long I'd have to live in the southern hemisphere for September to mean springtime to me. I do associate September with beginnings-- new school year, time for plans, goals, agendas, new projects. But there's also a sense of the year winding down, the days getting shorter, rain on the horizon and then in your shoes.

But here in Rosario, people are gearing up for spring. The last of the winter merchandise is heavily marked down. Changes in the bus schedule are announced. It seems the first day of spring is also a day off of school-- and, according to this morning's paper, the September 21 date is also a mistake, an inexact transfer by immigrants from the northern hemisphere, so that the spring equinox they were accustomed to (March 21) was transposed to September. What went wrong? The equinox is actually on the 22nd or 23rd in this hemisphere, varying slightly year to year.   

Seasons don't arrive on schedule anyway, whatever the calendar says, or ought to say. The weather has been cooperatively variable (read spring-like, in my seasonal experience): sunny but not too hot; then a full day of warmish, muggy rain; then cold, dusty wind under a gray sky, days I've worn sunglasses as safety goggles to protect against dust instead of glare. The grass in the parks looks worn, almost threadbare, reflecting a lack of rain. There are birds' eggs broken all over the sidewalks, and doves are trying to nest on my air-conditioner, or under it. And though I don't know if palm trees change at all from spring to fall--they always look the same to me--the lapachos are blooming. 

Lapachos apparently come in several colors, but so far I've only seen pink. The trees bloom before they leaf out, big, bundled, trumpety blossoms. They're here and there throughout the city, they line a couple of the downtown streets, preside over the park next to the maternity hospital a few blocks away. Sharing a cab with several new friends the other day, I asked the name of the pink flowering trees we passed, and the other women all agreed: seeing the lapachos in bloom was how they knew it was really spring.

View from Davis Silos (MACRO contemporary art museum)

The trees are beautiful. The sunshine today was delicious. Still, in my gut, it feels like fall. Something about taking the girl out of the season but not getting the season out of the girl. Maybe if I were here for a full round of seasons, it would feel different.

Running on Sunday

I set out to run on Sunday, either over toward the Paraná River and along the bluffs on the shore for a bit, as I've done before, or maybe taking Blvd. Oroño in the other direction, toward Parque de la Independencia [map]. But I found that the boulevard is closed to vehicle traffic on Sundays from 8:00-1:00, so I stayed right there and ran in a loop. No, I didn't run in crazy circles (though I did recall an old friend's reference to Quito's Avda. Amazonas as the tontódromo; think hippodrome, then insert "idiot" in place of horse), but it did make me happy.

Blvd. Oroño; no cars, plenty of people

There were still a few pauses at intersections. On corners with traffic signals, most of the assembled strolling/running/biking/ambling/skating/stroller-pushing crowd dutifully waited for the light to change; other intersections had police directing traffic, so cars wouldn't gush right into the non-motorized stream. 

Change the air! Recreational street.

The air seemed cleaner than when I've run on weekdays, though that may have been an illusion. The sun was out. One of the first things I did on arrival was to buy a pair of black sweatpants to run in, so I blended right in with all the other women of a certain age (i.e., mine ± 25 years). A girl on a little pink bike with training wheels pedaled madly after a teenier dog leashed to her handlebars. The occasional driver wondered how to get his car out of a corner gas station. Unlike some pools where the swimmers can be quite fierce about sharing lanes for lap-swimming, there was no particular directional regime; folks went up and down both traffic lanes and the sidewalk median. 

I went back later with my camera. I liked the green and white signs the city put out. I wanted to capture the flow of people. But I never feel comfortable sticking my camera right in someone's face--aside from family, I take a lot more pictures of flowers and buildings.

You go ahead; not your car.

And it wasn't that crowded. It was open. People had hours to take advantage of the car-free zone, and did. I don't know how long the initiative has been in place or how long it might last. Maybe there was controversy, maybe it's someone's crazy plan, maybe it's a tradition of long standing. I'll have to ask someone. I've met a couple of women who love to tell stories, so with any luck, I'll get an earful.

Paraná River Cruise

A few pictures from last weekend's river cruise, a two-hour trip from the Estación Fluvial (just below the Monumento a la Bandera), up to the foot of the Rosario-Victoria bridge and back. The water was high, so the boat was able to take a further channel, between islands, then return via the main channel of the Paraná.

Kayaks beached for a picnic

Long-term moorage

Fisherman's home

Some islands are more water than isle

Enough solid ground for a few cattle

And beehives (hard to see in the picture) behind a sign offering Miel

The Rosario-Victoria bridge, turn-around point for our boat

River traffic (heavy)

River traffic (light)

Approaching the dock again, near Parque España

Signs (taken for wonders?)

The exotic is always alluring; borrow a few words from another language, or a cinema icon from another era, and the possibilities blossom. Or wilt. I always enjoy reading signs (we recently turned the car around to photograph a sign for "Salad Shrimp" offered right next to night crawlers; imagine our disappointment when it was in fact "Sand Shrimp" that we had misread--a perfectly coherent listing of bait species.) A few signs that have made me smile, or left me thinking, over the past few days in Rosario:

Ming Fat Food? Is that really what they mean? (Lady Stork, at the bottom, sounds like maternity wear to me, but from the window, I think it's just regular shoes and clothes.) Eat too much Ming Fat, and you won't be able to achieve the long, lean lines demanded by:

Sutilezas King Kong--Alta Costura

Maybe it's the idea of King Kong's signature subtleties, heretofore unknown? High fashion in the sense of altitude, not class? The model looks as tall as the Empire State Building, anyway. 

For those of us in the more modest price ranges (far from high fashion) there's always:

Where everything's 2 pesos, unless it's not

The local variant on the dollar store promises everything for 2 pesos (about $0.50 US, right now) or "for less and more" as well. No one will be disappointed.

And finally, some of you have seen this, but I can't resist including Don Beef's promise to the masses: Pork for Everyone!

Seen any good signs lately?