Category: Alicia Yánez Cossío

  • 11 Odd Things Learned in the Course of Translation

    –tidbits picked up in translating Beyond the Islands (Alicia Yánez Cossío) and Trafalgar (Angélica Gorodischer)– Some days, translation is like a treasure hunt, a sanctioned scavenge after curious words and unfamiliar allusions. (Happily, I’m a fan of dictionaries and reference books; my dictionary stand is a prized possession.) When the project’s finished, some of those definitions and…

  • Translation Detours (more signposts)

    Treman State Park Earlier this month, I was in Ithaca to give a translation talk in the Latin American Studies Program seminar series and a reading from Detours at the Cornell Store. Naturally, I visited the waterfalls  and photographed a few detour signs. Then up to Rochester for the ALTA conference and even more translation…

  • 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…

  • Reading at Winter’s Hill

    This weekend, we celebrated the 2nd annual Wine and Word tasting at Winter’s Hill Vineyard. I wrote about last year’s reading here, and the pairing of wine–or food–with texts. It’s natural, I think, to bring them together; say what you will about eating only at a table with cutlery and dishes, sipping while reading (or…

  • Found time (found poems, found stories)

    If I’m careful on my class prep/writing days, I can just fit in a run between the time when I get too stiff to sit at the computer any longer and the time I need to pick my son up from school. (If I’m overwhelmed or disorganized, I end up working up to the last…

  • Teachable moments: vosotros and thou

    Every spring, the U. of Oregon hosts some 1500 high school language students and their teachers for Foreign Languages and International Studies Day (FLIS). They attend performances and short workshops on folksongs, food, poetry, jokes, family life, handy vocabulary for getting lost, for not getting lost. . . the list goes on (on the UO…