Family Business/Sharing Books

Winter's Hill Vineyard

UNO Press

Last week, visiting my family's winery, one of the wonderful women who often works special events there told me she'd bought a copy of Beyond the Islands for a friend of hers who would be diving in the Galápagos. What should she tell her friend about the book? Pirates, I said. Pirate treasure, and small-town boosters, and scientists amazed at the varied and impossible life of the islands. Poets and teachers and tourists. 

Book sharing is a family tradition, part of our daily lives, part of the family business. How many wineries sell literature in translation in their tasting rooms? Probably not too many. For me, it's been a wonderful way to get the books to people who might not otherwise find them, to make connections that might not otherwise be made.

I doubt I would have embarked on the same teaching/scholarly career or perhaps on translation had we not spent 15 months in northern Ecuador when I was in middle school. I would have been writing, but I might not have found my way to Latin America, to Ecuadorian narrative, to the Galápagos Islands and back. I might never have learned Spanish.

The classroom may be a more traditional space than a tasting room for literary connections but there, too, the specific links can be unexpected. A student recently approached me before class with a copy of Beyond the Islands. "This is my mother's favorite book," she told me. "Will you sign it for her?" Naturally, I was delighted--I only wish Alicia Yánez Cossío had been on hand to sign it, too. If I hadn't had a lecture to deliver, I'd have done a little happy dance, too.

What am I reading this week? Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. It's one of those (too numerous) books I'd meant to read for years. I finally picked it up when my daughter, who read it for school, pronounced the novel, "Not my all-time favorite book, but close." I haven't yet reached the chapter that tipped the book from "really good" to "close to all-time favorite" status for her, but so far, so good.

Does your family share books? 

2nd Annual Wine and Word Tasting

2^nd Annual Wine and Word Tasting at Winter's Hill Vineyard. Saturday, Feb. 11. Sample tasty morsels of poetry and prose expertly paired with fine Oregon wines. Short readings by local writers Barbara Drake, Karen McPherson, Kelly Terwilliger, Adrienne Mitchell and Amalia Gladhart served up in literary "flights" at 12:30,1:30, 2:30, and 3:30. Taste Winter's Hill wines accompanied by local cheese from Beroldingen Cheese and Full Circle Creamery. Winery open 11-5. Tasting fee, $15.  6451 Hilltop Lane, Dayton OR 97114  www.wintershilllwine.com

I'll be reading from Beyond the Islands and my novel-in-progress; our delicious blend includes translators, poets, novelists, and essayists. Please plan to join us, and spread the word to friends who might be in the area.

 

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.