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Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
José Arcadio BuendÃa no logró descifrar el sueño de las casas con paredes de espejo hasta el dÃa en que conoció el hielo. This (in chapter 2 of Cien Años de Soledad) seems like the first really strong punchline of the book. There have been plenty of chuckles throughout the first chapter and the beginning of the second, but this one absolutely cracked me up. My memory of reading the translation suggests that there are a lot more to come.
posted evening of February 4th, 2009: 2 responses
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009
I commented at The Great Whatsit today that I was not finding the second and third books of the His Dark Materials series quite as  overwhelmingly great as I found the first. But as of the reading I did with Sylvia tonight -- chapter 2 of The Amber Spyglass -- I want to take that back, and just say the middle book is a lull between two masterpieces. The beauty of the narrative here is just enough to take my breath away. I am realizing that these books could be made into a truly fantastic series of movies if only the studios were not so attached to live action and CGI -- I think they are a perfect match for anime (or maybe I mean "for Studio Ghibli", which is about the sum total of my exposure to anime). Reading about Will talking to Balthamos and Baruch, especially the fight against Metatron, was bringing visions of Spirited Away flickering across my mind. Metatron is even a perfect name for an anime bad guy! I also noticed a couple of coincidences of imagery with Cien Años de Soledad, which I take as a very good sign -- I am absorbing enough of the book even without knowing the language well, for it to be on my mind when I'm not reading it. When the narrator noted that Will's knife could cut between worlds but could not "abolish distance within worlds," I immediately flashed on Melquíades' statement that "la ciencia ha eliminado las distancias"; and when Will's boots were sinking into the soft sand in the hot, humid new world, my mind jumped to "aquel paraíso de humedad y silencio,... donde las botas se hundían en pozos de aceite humeante..."
posted evening of January 28th, 2009: Respond
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Sunday, January 25th, 2009
At emol.com there is a site dedicated to Cien Años de Soledad -- it is a Flash application so  I can't link to pages inside it; but if you click "Entrar" and watch the lovely video of mariposas amarillas, and then click "Fragmentos", several recorded readings of passages from the book are available, along with the text being read. Following each reading is some discussion of the passage; I am not understanding Spanish well enough yet to follow that.
 Another useful page is Macondo at The Modern Word -- a huge trove of links and information about the author and his works.
posted morning of January 25th, 2009: Respond
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Saturday, January 24th, 2009
I checked out Cien Años de Soledad from the library today -- not sure how far I'm going to be able to get with it, but I'm having fun with it. So far I have gotten to where I can read the first two paragraphs (about 5 pages) pretty fluently; I've been going back over them to try and work the vocabulary into my brain before I move on. I was made very happy by the sentence, "El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo." -- "The world was so new, many things did not yet have a name, and in order to mention them, you had to point them out with your finger." I loved this sentence when I read the book in English but had forgotten it. I am curious about what exactly accent marks do in written Spanish. Are they optional? In these first 5 pages there are several instances of aun and aún, which seem to be the same word and pronounced the same way. Maybe there's a subtle distinction I'm not picking up on. And I seem to recall seeing solo both with and without an accent over the first "o".
 ...Well this page solves at least one piece of the puzzle; accent marks are not optional, and "sólo" means something different from "solo" ("only" vs. "alone") -- it doesn't mention "aun," but I'm assuming there is a subtle difference in meaning between the two spellings. That distinction looks pretty synthetic to me; forcing different spellings for what is essentially a single word, according to how it is used in a sentence. Seems like it must be a pretty common mistake to leave the accent off of "sòlo" or put one onto "solo". ...Okay: this page says, "The word aún means todavÃa or still, while aun means incluso or even." So, problem solved, I guess.
posted evening of January 24th, 2009: 10 responses
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