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Elemental
Of course, one of the things I told myself I would do over the long weekend is read. Predictably, I didn't do much. You could say I finished two books, but I had less then ten pages to go in each, so that's hardly saying anything. One was a collection of short stories by Manly Wade Wellman, which I was deliberately taking my time with. (Wish I'd dispensed with it on a stronger note than "And the Hairy Ones Shall Dance".) The other was Plaça del Diamant, which I think sets a personal record for most time elapsed between beginning and finishing a novel. (I can't remember when I first started it, but I know it was twenty years ago when I last made a serious push.)
It pains me to acknowledge that my Spanish-reading skills have at long last eclipsed my skill at reading Catalan. This shouldn't surprise, given that I've only ever read three Catalan novels in my life (and that's including Rodoreda) but it's the degree of the disparity that's dismaying. When I was contrasting reading Catalan authors to reading, say, Gabriel "Crazy Jungle Spanish" García Márquez, this wasn't quite so noticeable. But the Bolaño reads so easy in comparison to Rodoreda, despite the fact that the latter is deliberately narrated in the voice of a working-class woman with limited education.
On the other hand, there could be the same odd sort of reversal at play that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zompist alluded to in our recent convo. He mentioned that his native Spanish-speaking wife was impressed he could read Borges, but he pointed out that what makes his prose difficult tends to be the diction, namely that he uses a lot of upper-register vocabulary the average speaker isn't familiar with. But in Spanish as in English, these words tends to be Latinate and so the overlap is considerable. The bigger your vocabulary in English, the more of that transfers over into Western Romance languages.
By contrast, it's the colloquial level of vocabulary that you're likely to struggle with, and all bets are off when it comes to slang. That was my biggest worry with the Bolaño, since the milieu is college students in Mexico City in the 70s. But it helps that the narrator is somewhat of a pseudointellectual, so the style is more formal than it might otherwise be. So far there's only been one dialogue that was incomprehensible without reference to a lexicon of Mexican slang. There's not much actual slang in the Rodoreda, but some of the words do seem very specific to early-20th-century Barcelona (to the extent that even larger monolingual Catalan dictionaries omit them).
The upshot is that, even though I mostly neglected it over the weekend, I polished off the first part of Detectives salvajes on the shuttle this morning. However, Diego did warn me that this is also the easiest part, with the going getting steadily harder through the big fat middle section. I plan to keep that in mind and not get discouraged. Normally, I take along an English-language work for when I need a respite from reading a foreign novel, but I haven't felt the need of one yet. If I'm too tired for Ulises and Arturo, I'm pretty much too tired to read anything at all, and that's refreshing.
It pains me to acknowledge that my Spanish-reading skills have at long last eclipsed my skill at reading Catalan. This shouldn't surprise, given that I've only ever read three Catalan novels in my life (and that's including Rodoreda) but it's the degree of the disparity that's dismaying. When I was contrasting reading Catalan authors to reading, say, Gabriel "Crazy Jungle Spanish" García Márquez, this wasn't quite so noticeable. But the Bolaño reads so easy in comparison to Rodoreda, despite the fact that the latter is deliberately narrated in the voice of a working-class woman with limited education.
On the other hand, there could be the same odd sort of reversal at play that
zompist alluded to in our recent convo. He mentioned that his native Spanish-speaking wife was impressed he could read Borges, but he pointed out that what makes his prose difficult tends to be the diction, namely that he uses a lot of upper-register vocabulary the average speaker isn't familiar with. But in Spanish as in English, these words tends to be Latinate and so the overlap is considerable. The bigger your vocabulary in English, the more of that transfers over into Western Romance languages.By contrast, it's the colloquial level of vocabulary that you're likely to struggle with, and all bets are off when it comes to slang. That was my biggest worry with the Bolaño, since the milieu is college students in Mexico City in the 70s. But it helps that the narrator is somewhat of a pseudointellectual, so the style is more formal than it might otherwise be. So far there's only been one dialogue that was incomprehensible without reference to a lexicon of Mexican slang. There's not much actual slang in the Rodoreda, but some of the words do seem very specific to early-20th-century Barcelona (to the extent that even larger monolingual Catalan dictionaries omit them).
The upshot is that, even though I mostly neglected it over the weekend, I polished off the first part of Detectives salvajes on the shuttle this morning. However, Diego did warn me that this is also the easiest part, with the going getting steadily harder through the big fat middle section. I plan to keep that in mind and not get discouraged. Normally, I take along an English-language work for when I need a respite from reading a foreign novel, but I haven't felt the need of one yet. If I'm too tired for Ulises and Arturo, I'm pretty much too tired to read anything at all, and that's refreshing.