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Unit Analysis
‘Tis the season to stop and smell the daphne, rich and perfumey but not overpowering, maybe because it’s dispersed outdoors, or maybe the cool air filters it. If I’m walking in the neighborhood or across campus, suddenly there it is, a shifting cloud of deliciousness from an invisible shrub, a siren song of scent. Am…
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Wine and Word Celebration at Winter’s Hill Feb. 16
Counting down. . . Tomorrow is the the third annual Wine and Word Celebration at Winter’s Hill Vineyard. The tasting room is open 11-5; we’ll have readings and word tastings on the hour, starting at noon. Pinot noir and Pinot gris from Winter’s Hill, paired with poetry, science fiction, baseball, watershed restoration, dramatic monologue, translation, more wine.…
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Blog shift, format, wine & word
So much at once, right? For a couple of years now, I’ve been blogging at ¿Se enseña aquí? — a blog begun partly in the hopes of encouraging students to study abroad (in particular in the program in Rosario, Argentina, where I was about to teach) and continued as a way to talk about translation, language…
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Still Noticing, Collecting (Detour 13)
We spent the third weekend in January at the coast, an extended family tradition–long walks, seafood, puzzles, wine. Walks remembered and compared; stones retrieved from tide pools, examined, mulled, returned– dropped gently, perhaps, or absentmindedly; or flung full-armed into the further surf, that pitcher’s arc none of us ever truly mastered. Remembered others’ beach traditions…
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Ice
There generally isn’t a lot of ice where I live now. Enough to skid out in the dark, but not much to photograph–or to describe, since black ice seems to demand an absence of description. It’s an unseeable hazard, or a cold mirage, flip side to the illusory oasis all those cartoon desert stragglers seem…
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Wine and Word Tasting, 3rd. edition
The third edition of Wine and Word Tasting at Winter’s Hill Vineyard will take place on Saturday, February 16, 11:00-5:00. I’ll be reading from Detours and from my translation of Angélica Gorodischer’s Trafalgar, which should be hot off the Small Beer Press. We have a great line-up of readers and writers this year, with something for…
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Noticing
Doesn’t look quite real, does it? But it is, this clerodendron growing beside my parents’ driveway. I don’t know a lot about plants, though I look the names up often–for translations, for poems, for no good reason. Wikipedia tells me clerodendron’s common names include “glorybower,” “bagflower,” and “bleeding-heart,” which don’t seem real, either. Seem, at…
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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…
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Verbicide, the misunderstood crime
The word of the day (happy result of a dictionary detour) is: verbicide 1. the willful distortion or depreciation of the original meaning of a word.2. a person who willfully distorts the meaning of a word. Note the deliberation: verbicide is a sin of commission. This isn’t malapropism, mistaken identity, well-meaning thought getting out…
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Proofreading and Second Chances
It has never yet happened that, reading proofs, I haven’t found some dreadful if trifling error–often after 20 or 30 error-free pages, when I was beginning to wonder whether the task was, indeed, worthwhile. But there it will be, the third i in the middle of a word, the second however in a row. No…