On reading Julia Child (preparation is no free lunch)

I have just finished reading Julia Child's My Life in France. It is full of wonderful-sounding food--so much so that, while it's a level of cooking detail I have seldom even approached ("nothing is too much trouble" is a repeated phrase in the memoir), I find myself wanting my very own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In hardcover.

But, cooking aside, one of the things I enjoyed most in the book were the attention to traveling and to cultural adaptation--and to a kind of translation, as Child worked to write up a particular kind of French cooking in terms an American cook (of a particular time) might understand and embrace. I enjoyed the energy with which she threw herself into learning new languages as Foreign Service postings took the Childs to Germany and Norway. France may have been her great love, but there was still a big, wide, varied world to understand. I loved her insistence on learning enough of the local language to go to the market--that is, to talk to the people around her. 

And perhaps my favorite passage, which has nothing to do with cooking: 

"As our ferryboat from Denmark made its way up the winding Oslo Fjord in May 1959, we looked at the granite boulders and high cliffs covered with pine trees, sniffed the cool, salty-piney air, and said to each other: 'Norway is just like Maine!' Which it was, and it wasn't.

You can prepare yourself to enter a new culture, but the reality always takes some getting used to."

Here's to a new year of preparation and getting used to--aprendiendo a enseñarnos en otros lugares, con nuevos sabores. A good 2011 to all!

Interpretive pleasures of travel

I didn't drop off the face of the earth. I went to New Zealand.

Wellington is about as rainy as Oregon (more so, some days) but the sun peeked out and I didn't catch the fabled wind. The Pohutukawa trees were in bloom, many of them. I left the hotel window cracked (the room was stuffy) and woke to birdsong around 5 a.m. Then came the truck. I had a seventh floor room overlooking the city, with a slice of harbor in the distance. The botanical gardens held plump, busy brown parrots. A sign above the entrance to the hotel gym, located just off the pool, pleaded No wet costumes in gymnasium, please. Of course, I knew what they meant. But I prefer to imagine soggy pandas, witches, superheroes--all the stuff of Halloween--dripping on the free weights and the nonskid floor.

My first stop was a translation conference-- "Talking Past Each Other" -- held at the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation (Victoria University of Wellington). It was a terrific conference, with strong papers and good conversation (and tasty snacks!). Big cheers for Jean Anderson, the center director, and her team. I have another long list of books to seek out.

After the conference, I took the opportunity to do just a little sightseeing. (I'll have to go back, with the full family crew, and do some real hiking.)

One highlight: a tractor-pulled excursion along the beach to the gannet colony at Cape Kidnappers. I don't know how many birds there were--thousands--burbling and hooting, dragging seaweed back to the line the nests, preening, stretching, edging restlessly around the fluffy, awkward chick in the nest. They don't hatch all at once, so there were gray, nearly featherless chicks the color of stone next door to bewildered white powder puffs, stretching their necks to look around. The chicks spend four months or so just sitting in the nest; those that roll or stumble out are likely to be pecked and harassed to death by territorial neighbors. At roughly four months of age, the chicks make their first flight--to Australia. Many swim part of the way.

The tractor trip is evidently a traditional family outing for many in the area. Most of the group of 20 or so of us were Kiwis, some local, some from a few hours away. A couple from Christchurch were making their third attempt at seeing the colony with chicks. There were two German families, and families from Singapore and Malaysia.

I was reading Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness at the time, a book (for those who haven't read it) in which gender is distinctly undecidable. So I was struck by the guide's telling us, first, that male and female gannets are indistinguishable: same markings, same size, both sit on the eggs. But, he went on, it's the male who gathers the seaweed for the nest. If we saw one with a beak full of greenery, we'd know what we were seeing. 

Traveling, you want to know what you're looking at. And if we have the categories, it's hard not to use them.

Kirdaglass & Marillín: Still thinking about accents

Here's a fun code. I first read Angélica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial this past summer in Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent translation. (For anyone considering study in Rosario, by the way, Gorodischer is a rosarina.) There's a lovely creation story near the end, a kind of mash-up of movie actors, plot points, technologies, and conventions (much more inventive than I make it sound--it offers a lot of room to think about how we take stories in and then remake them, and how our creation stories, as stories, also shape us). But sound--that's a big part of the story. Names shift across borders, pronounced differently by speakers of different languages, stressed on different syllables. There's a code here, derived from mostly U.S. movies--non-Argentine movies, anyway--that, in translation, may yet be less available to the English-language reader. Even though, to a degree, it's been translated "back" into its native cultural milieu. 

I'm no film expert--I'm not even a maven, really--so film allusions aren't what springs most readily to mind for me when I'm reading. Still, the first title in italics charge of the light brigade was a hint, as was  the saloon door and, eventually, the names of the actors. The description of the projector (never named as such) helped, too: "a very thick lens, and it had just one eyelid around it [ . . ]. And out of this eye came a tiny speck of dust that got bigger and bigger, and then the eye saw that pinch of dust turn into a house" (Kalpa Imperial, Trans. Le Guin, p. 230).

Gorodischer adapts iconic actors' names to Spanish pronunciation: Kirdaglass, Marillín, Marlenditrij, Betedeivis, Briyibardó, Jedilamar. Good (if transplanted) Midwesterner that I am, I read KUR-duh-GLASS the first time or two, then had my little ah hah! moment: Kirk Douglass. Remember, I'm reading the English. Le Guin has kept the spelling of Gorodsicher's invented names. That seems appropriate. The names are distorted and re-imagined within the novel; their importance stems, in part, from the distance between the original name and the actors'/characters' form--and function--in Gorodsicher's tale. Still, I wonder about the availability of the code to the monolingual English reader, who might not trace Jedilamar back to Hedy Lamarr.

I haven't done the scene justice, thinking mainly about sound and about cross-language adaptation. There's more here. It's a multi-layered code one that includes the names of the actors, the conventions of cinema, the conventions of story-telling. Check out the novel itself, in either English or Spanish (or both!)

Gorodischer, Angélica. Kalpa Imperial. Various editions, most recently Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001.

---. Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was. Trans. Ursula K. Le Guin. Northampton, MA: Small Beer Press, 2003.

Iguazú words

I'm watching a travel site slideshow of Iguazú Falls (not coincidentally, a frequent excursion destination for the study abroad program in Rosario, Argentina, where I'll be teaching next fall). The images are mesmerizing, so I'll leave aside the absurdity of a natural feature having an "official" site and supply the link just for fun (http://www.iguazuargentina.com/espanol/).     

                                                                                               

Photo: Alejandro Yacono

Falls have their own language, their own lexicon. Not the noise of the falls, though a sound poet might find much to work with along those lines (deafening roar, silence in sound, a pattern that seems constant yet changes, just as the water pours over in a variable yet endlessly similar stream). But I'm thinking of a typology. My daughter once gave me a hiking guide that pinpoints waterfalls across the Pacific Northwest. Stylized icons flag the Plunge, the Horsetail, the Punchbowl, the Block, the Tier. I don't know whether this is a standard subdivision or the unique invention of the guide's author (Gregory A. Plumb, Waterfall Lover's Guide--Pacific Northwest) but I find the variations intriguing. The falls come rated, too, from the single star ("Uninspiring. Probably not interesting except to waterfall collectors") to the 5-star "awe-inspiring sight."

I won't try to decipher Iguazú's formal structure from a distance. On the rating scale, though, its place is clear: The Guardian's 2010 Travel Awards rank it the number 1 world scenic attraction (http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2010/oct/16/travel-awards-2010).

The Diccionario de la Real Academia does not dabble in "cola de caballo" or "cascada abanico," soberly defining cascada as: "Caída desde cierta altura del agua de un río u otra corriente por brusco desnivel del cauce." For a straight translation, the Oxford Spanish Dictionary presents three alternatives: cascada, salto de agua, catarata.  Catarata is designated "large," but beyond that the dictionary offers no way to choose among the three. Salto de agua is intriguing in comparison to the English fall-- my first associations with salto suggest jumping, upward motion; still, one might jump (down) off a cliff as well as up onto a table to dance. The water leaps into space and tumbles down.

I have never met a waterfall collector, though I've taken more than my share of waterfall photographs. And I'm a sucker for specialized word lists--I do collect those. Las Cataratas del Iguazú, at the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, should offer plenty of opportunities to broaden my waterfall vocabulary into Spanish, Portuguese, or Guaraní. So now I'm looking for a list of waterfall forms in Spanish. Suggestions welcome! 

So what do you call this place, anyway?

The first time we visited the Mezquita in Córdoba, we admired the extraordinary red and white pillars and arches, we examined the detailed stonework and elaborate inscriptions, we noted the chapels, and then we emerged into the front courtyard, visit completed--certain we'd missed something. Was that it? we asked the guards. We took a wrong turn, we skipped part of what we came to see. Can we go back in?

The guards were accommodating. We retraced our steps. But where were the endless, unbroken ranks of columns we had seen in photographs, images carefully framed to block or elide any evidence of the imposition of the Christian cathedral on the prior structure?

English language guidebooks to Spain almost invariably highlight the Mezquita, using the Spanish term. Mosque appears below the heading, in the body of the description, for clarity, and cathedral appears lower still. The fact of the cathedral built within (or on top of) the mosque is explained, often critically, sometimes in considerable detail. Still, before I went there, my impression was of a largely untouched mosque, with some later Christian detail off to one side.

The politics of place names are complicated. So, too, their translation. This past week, I read in the paper that the bishop of Córdoba has proposed changing the signs that appear around the city, directing visitors to the "mosque-cathedral," dropping the mosque reference to reduce confusion. As might be expected, the idea is not universally endorsed. [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/world/europe/05cordoba.html]

I read about the mosque/mezquita/cathedral/catedral signs in a week when I was already thinking about names. Like individual names, place names carry a host of associations. Names of towns or monuments or mountains might derive from historical events, notable inhabitants, conquerors, rebels, accidents, points of national pride or public embarrassment. Character names carry baggage as well, connotations that may be intended or accidental. A writing blog raised the question of how different people name characters--always an entertaining challenge. What's in a (fictional) name? It might be anything. Revenge on the hated sixth-grade art teacher who trashed your favorite painting; homage to the neighbor who always feeds your cat. In fiction there's not the same risk of causing misery--I might saddle a character with a moniker I'd never have left my flesh-and-blood child to struggle under on the playground.

But there is the question of getting it right, of finding the name that adequately evokes the place or person described or invented. I am also reading with great enjoyment (several years now after it first came out) Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. It's a book to dip in and out of, almost trolling for found poems, to enjoy terms like "frost hollow" or "ganderbrush" or "ramadero." These are not just definitions, but short narratives, records of settlement, change, restoration, misperception. Possibilities to savor, opportunities lost.

Somehow, for me, the question of what a place might be called, and how the people who move through that place might be imagined or understood, are connected, and connected as well to an image of arches or columns that recede toward an uninterrupted horizon, but only if the observer stands in the right place.

Accents in Translation

I am working on a paper called "Funny Accents," about translating accents in fiction.  Of course, it's unkind to laugh at someone's accent, but fiction writers, at the behest of their characters (on pretext of their characters?) undertake all kinds of uncool or cruel or misguided acts, and teasing people who talk funny is one of them.  The translator has to carry the jokes, the misperceptions, and the snarky tone into the target language--yet the target language reader may, in many instances, be the butt of the joke. One of the characters in my most recent translation, of Alicia Yánez Cossío's Más allá de las islas [Beyond the Islands] is a naïve, misguided gringo, the embodiment of technological overkill and the unwitting pawn of mysterious foreign powers, who speaks a Spanish that can only be called dreadful. Translating him has me thinking about the various meanings we apply to accents, and how my own accent (in English or Spanish) might translate from place to place.

As a professor of literature and language, I am sympathetic; as a language learner, even more so. It takes guts to put oneself out there, attempting to communicate in a language one does not know well. Still, what comes out of our mouths is often funny. Ecuadorian friends laughed for years at my "no intindir," which was a mispronounced "no entender," which revealed that not only did I not understand, I couldn't conjugate the verb. But more than mockery is at stake when we consider foreign accents. Research by social psychologists suggests we're more apt to disbelieve people who speak with an accent, as if lack of language accuracy signaled lack of information (see Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2010). Accents can also be markers of identity. There are language-learner accents and there are regional accents. Sometimes the two get tangled up, and the learner trips over the regional intonation. When I was in graduate school, one of the other teaching assistants for first year Spanish was from Uruguay, and there were students who complained that his accent was incomprehensible. At the time, I thought, but you don't know any Spanish; how is his accent more incomprehensible than any other? My assumption was that a change of accents might be traumatic, but that one might imprint initially with any version of Spanish with equal ease. I don't know if this is true.

I've also  been reading a lot of travel books, preparing for next year's trip to Argentina. Nearly every guide to Argentina includes a short section on Argentine Spanish, usually set off in a little box and highlighted with an eye-catching background color, the way insider tips on locating authentic tango or finding souvenir bargains are marked. Curiously, these language tips often take the form of a warning: National Geographic Traveler: Argentina (2010) warns "Argentine Spanish, however, may surprise those who have learned the language elsewhere, and novices may acquire habits that are less useful in other countries" (21). Moon Handbooks Argentina (2007), explaining the voseo (2^nd person pronoun vos instead of tú) cautions that "Alert travelers […] may wish to refrain from using the form, considered substandard in some contexts, unless absolutely certain that it is appropriate. The tuteo is never incorrect, though it may sound quaint in some contexts" (596). Well, tú is certainly incorrect if the occasion calls for the formal Usted, but that's another issue. The cautious approach seems to go against the grain of an immersion program, where the goal is to spend long enough in another country to adapt to and even adopt the local culture. I wonder, too, which Spanish the travelers are assumed to have encountered: Peninsular? Mexican? Nuyorican? But the invitation to language awareness is welcome, as is the reminder, not always explicit, that in speaking we can choose among words or phrases, and also among tones. Perhaps the alert traveler, aspiring to a chameleon-like adaptation to a new linguistic environment, hopes the voseo will help her blend in.

But what kind of English should that character in Beyond the Islands speak? In a novel written in Spanish, he stands out like a sore thumb. No one else sounds like him. Many of his mistakes will sound familiar to readers who've had some dealings with Anglophone Spanish-learners, but they're exaggerated as well. So his English needs to be funny, it needs to be error-riddled, and it needs to be set off from the rest of the book. I'm essentially translating the character back into his native language, but this is a fictional character, after all, not a human being transported back to his native speech community. There's no off-page norm I can apply. So far, I've opted for a few lines of mangled English, with mistakes that roughly parallel the errors in his Spanish. I don't want the reader to think the novel takes place in an English-speaking country. It doesn't. It takes place in the Galápagos. And the funny accents the foreigners carry along on their vacations are part of the weave of the text, as are the stumbles, the distortions, the words that aren't really words, that will trip the reader up from time to time. And, I hope, get a laugh.

Dances with Corn

Language learners, asked point blank what a word means--or worse, challenged, even gently, on a definition--will exhibit a reflexive twitch of doubt. Maybe it doesn't mean what I think it does. Plenty of words have regionally specific connotations. Plenty of definitions become mangled beyond recognition.

My daughter and her friend share a recorder lesson. One of their current pieces is a tango, "El choclo." When I picked them up on Thursday, their teacher asked me what choclo meant. Like any good Spanish-speaker who learned her Spanish in Ecuador, I said, "It means corn on the cob, an ear of corn." Hilarity. Is corn on the cob the stuff of tangos? Of course not. I had to be wrong. Granted, there's plenty of room for double entendre in the title, but the kids are young. We sashayed around the room in a wholly imaginary tango; we chortled about the steamy implications of freshly buttered corn. And like a good translator and professor, I ran home to my dictionaries. Looking things up is one of the pleasures of scholarship and of teaching in general.

Anyone moderately knowledgeable about the tango would have known, as I did not, that "El choclo" is famous. Borges, for instance, mentions it in his "A History of the Tango" (included in On Argentina, edited by Alfred Mac Adam). But I started with the word, rather than the song. My Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado offered the expected "mazorca de maíz no maduro aún" as well as, from Mexico, the idiom meter el choclo, meaning "cometer un desatino"--to blunder or, perhaps more idiomatically, to put one's foot in it. My beloved Collins Spanish Dictionary, bought when I was an undergraduate, lists "ear of (tender) maize," which I find particularly delightful, but precedes that with "clog; sandal; overshoe" and follows with, among other meanings, "(Arg) difficulty, trouble; annoyance; burden, task." That seemed likely enough: the burden of lost love, the annoyance of rivalry--all the anguish and passion customarily associated with the tango.

When I turned to the tango itself, I found plenty of possibilities. Historians, essayists, bloggers--they've all had a go. "El choclo" has inspired multiple lyricists, translators, dancers, even filmmakers. I found several supposed origins for the title, including a reference to a golden haired pimp (hair as yellow as corn) and to the composer's favorite ingredient in a stew. Later lyrics don't seem to mention choclo after the title. But based on this first verse, from the early lyrics by Angel Villoldo, our little corn dance wasn't so far off:

Hay choclos que tienen


las espigas de oro,


que son las que adoro


con tierna pasión.

There are corncobs whose kernels

are perfectly golden

they're the ones I adore

with true tender passion.

Not a great translation, but it's my first attempt. The initial rhythm is good, but then it falls apart, and there's no rhyme anywhere. I wanted to keep tender (tierna), thinking of corn on the cob, but true is in there just to add a beat.

Still, it's a happy ending. I like to get my money's worth from my kids' lessons: I want to learn something, too. And the word means what I thought it did, but now it means something more to me as well.