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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…
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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…
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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…
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Underlining: an irresistibly unreliable narrator talks about art
The Topless Tower, Silvina Ocampo’s long story/novella, translated by James Womack (London: Hesperus Worldwide, 2010) is the tale of 9-year-old Leandro’s unexpected entrapment and eventual redemption. Leandro mixes first and third person, sometimes inside his story, sometimes beside it, almost always inside the tower that he both suffers and creates. It’s a story about writing…
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Wish you were here. . .
My bookstore find this week: two small, square books of reprints of 19th and early 20th century postcards from Argentina, landscapes and gauchos, good tourist fodder. Some are black and white, others tinted in pastel shades that bathe the mountains in a perpetual sunrise or sunset. The backs of the cards aren’t reproduced, but some…