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C is for Catalan
Teach yourself Catalan Yates, Alan. Sevenoaks : Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.This is one of those books which I can say literally changed my life. The year was 1990. It was exam week of spring quarter and I was feeling restless, unfocussed. In a burst of escapism, I bought this book from the Seminary Co-op--which to this day maintains a cell just past the checkout counter barely 1.5 x 1.5 metres and lined with an incredible range of language learning materials. (If that sounds more-or-less like an Orgasmatron for language freaks like me, it is.)
I'm still not sure what exactly drew me to it. I'd only learned of the existence of Catalan a few years earlier, probably from Mario Pei. My only experience with learning a Romance language had been high-school Spanish, which I ended up taking mainly because they didn't offer German and it seemed more practical than Latin and less foofy than French, my remaining options. My teacher Mr Schriewer I grew to like a great deal, but I never came to appreciate the language in the same way.
With Catalan, on the other hand, it was love from first sight. A lot of that, frankly, was the book itself. I checked out a much older instructional text from the library--I remember poring over it while staying over at my Gay Godfathers' summer home that summer--but I soon forgot about it; if that had been my only textbook, I never would have persevered. To this day, Yates' Teach yourself Catalan remains for me a masterpiece of concision and engagement, the standard by which I judge all other books in the series. Its organisation and layout are exceptional; explanations clear and succinct; the exercises and example sentences are simultaneously useful, natural-sounding, and interesting; the reading samples were appropriate and amusing.
This was my first exposure to the work of Pere Calders, and if I don't love him as I once did, I've never regretted the time I devoted to learning his œuvre. Less than a year after reading this first short story, I bought his Cròniques de la veritat oculta at a shop in the Barri Xinès of Barcelona; before too long, I head read every story in it, some of them as many as five times or more. It was the impetus for my one real attempt at literary translation, as I sought a means of making his wonderful work accessible to my friends who didn't read Catalan. (Which is to say, all of them.)
The cheap paperback wasn't built to withstand the wear of being carted to Germany and thence to Spain (where I made my first feeble attempts to speak a language I'd never actually heard before); the cover has fallen off and I don't know how much longer the text block will stay together, but I've never considered replacing it. In my shelf of Teach Yourself books, it still has pride of place.
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Thank you for calling me back to a happier time, when we could believe that studying some Catalan would make it all better again.
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Me too. (sigh)
I'm about to cull my seven shelves of language books. Heavily.
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