The Death of Imagination

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 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.

One of the oddities of learning a language through formal instruction is that the most basic sentences can be the hardest to understand. For an English-speaker, this is nowhere more true than with the Romance languages, which share a lot of higher vocabulary. Even those of you who have never studied Spanish probably have little trouble making sense of a sentence like, "Su territorio está dividido en 23 provincias y una ciudad autónoma, Buenos Aires, capital de la nación y sede del gobierno federal." But you'd be at least as stumped as I was by this fragment from Marsé:

...tendiendo la colada con una tonadilla y dos pinzas entre los dientes.

Bolded are all the words I wasn't familiar with. So all I understood was that a woman was in the yard tending? the...something to do with "tail"? with a...I've got no idea. Pinzas might've been the key for me to unlock the entire meaning if only I'd remembered it could mean "clothespins" in addition to "pincers". The words I didn't know were "hanging up", "washing", and, well, tonadilla, a uniquely Spanish musical form that sounds like a cross between a ballad and a light opera air. (Now you see why I enjoy Marsé so much; "with a ballad and two pins between her teeth" is quite a nice turn of phrase.)

Now there's a word I haven't thought about in maybe twenty-five years: jebe. I learned it as a Peruvian slang term for "condom". You see, my high school was Marianist, and the order ran schools in Peru as well. So one year we had a bunch of Peruvian students come stay in the dorm with us. It was kind of a fiasco--they were spoiled Lima boys and this was their summer break, so they weren't at all interested in being in school and mostly rubbed us all the wrong way. And even though I was taking Spanish, I didn't learn much of anything from them except a few informal terms like cachar and pinga (which my Spanish teacher even marked wrong on a test of anatomical terminology). But the tiniest of them showed me one of those calculator tricks whereby "bebé" becomes "jebe", and he had to explain the joke to me.

I don't think I've encountred it in the wild since. Its range seems to be very limited. The DRAE gives two synonyms: alumbre ("alum") and hevea ("rubber tree"). WordReference lists only the second of these, plus a variety of extended meanings (mostly informal) including goma ("rubber; eraser"), elástico ("elastic"), porra ("club"), trasero ("backside"), and finally the definition I know. The etymon is apparently Arabic šabb "alum", and how this gets transferred to rubber is a mystery I'm well unqualified to attempt to solve.

Went for a bagel right now and ran into a Mexican groundskeeper I'm chummy with, so we chatted cordially for as long as our paths coincided. Some days I'm rather curt because I'm simply not in the mood to speak Spanish, but today I thought I did rather well. Except for one thing: I kept substituting oui for sí. Or rather--using the pronunciation which predominates in Quebec--ouais. If you were to transcribe this according to Spanish orthographic conventions, it would come out "güey".

*dies of embarrassment*

Last night my bedtime reading was Ralph Penny's Variation and change in Spanish. I forget why I originally reached for it--to check on the distribution of yeísmo in Spanish America, perhaps? In any case, I found myself more engaged by his historical treatment of the reasons for disparities between American and Peninsular Spanish in the distribution of the simple past and present perfect (pp. 158-161). I've written before about how I find the American (specifically, Mexican) usage totally baffling at times. Penny notes that "The reader will later recognise that American English differs from British English, in this regard, in approximately the same way that American Spanish differs from most varieties of Peninsular Spanish." But his prototypical illustration of American usage, Hoy llovío todo el día, sounds just as odd to me in English (i.e. "It rained all day today").

In any case, the truly surprising thing is that such sentences are apparently equally typical of the Spanish of northwestern Spain--including the Canaries. This makes promiscuous use of the simple present one of the very few widespread features of American Spanish which is not also common to Western Andalusia. I learned from Lipski's book on the isleños that a significant number of American colonists originated in the Canaries since (a) like most smaller islands, they soon developed an overpopulation problem and (b) they were the first stop on the transatlantic route to Havana. So that gives us a plausible route by which this feature got to America. (The Canaries were also heavily settled from Western Andalusia and Extremadura and so shares many features--e.g. seseo, yeísmo, aspiration, generalisation of Ustedes, etc.--with these dialects.)

The other interesting tidbit was a hierarchy copied from Martin Harris of the evolution in meaning of the present perfect in Romance:

1. A present state resulting from a past action.
2. Current relevance[*] of the past situation indicated by the participle (also marked for duration, repetition).
3. Past action with present relevance (but unmarked for duration, repetition, etc.).
4. Past situations without present relevance.

Harris (or Penny) puts Standard French at rung 4, Standard Peninsular Spanish and Standard Italian at 3, and Northwestern Peninsular Spanish/Canarian/American Spanish "arguably" at 2. So the second surprising thing about the American usage is that it may actually represent a conservative feature rather than the innovation I've always considered it to be.

The fact that this hierarchy was specifically created with Romance in mind notwithstanding, right away I began thinking where to slot other languages. Southern German (dialect and Standard), for instance, obviously belongs alongside French on rung 4. (Northern German I can't speak to because I don't understand the use of the perfect in those varieties.) As stated earlier, many varieties of American English are arguably at 2 as well. Only one language I know immediately presented itself as a candidate for the first rung, namely Irish. (Or perhaps I should say "Late Traditional Irish", because it appears the Irish answer to the perfect may be spreading rapidly under influence from English.)

So although I've looked at this book several times since receiving it for Hogmanay (thanks again, monshu!), it still has much more to reveal to me. Incidentally, if you're at all interested in the evolution of Spanish--or even Iberian Romance generally--from Latin, you could hardly do better than to purchase Penny's A history of the Spanish language. So clear and concise, I consider it a model for all other grammatical histories to follow.


[*] Astute observers will note the appearance of the old weasel word "relevance" so commonly invoked in explanations of the perfect. (If it's not relevant, why talk about it at all?) But earlier Penny discusses the usage more in terms of boundedness.

Yes, Friends, amid all the Farmville reports and invites to open eggs or whomp on Russian mobsters, there is the occasion nugget of interest. A Friend of mine recently wrote:

Si vienen a Chicago, me tienen que visitar en el [restaurante].

Pretty banal from a content point of view: "If you [pl.] come to Chicago, you have to visit me at the [restaurant]." But what caught my attention was the position of the "me". You see, I would've expected "Tienen que visitarme", with it tacked right onto the infinitive. But it's not, it's right at the beginning as if the meaning being expressed were really "You have me to visit at the restaurante". It's called "clitic raising" and I didn't know you could do it across que, a Spanish subordinating conjunction.

In retrospect, this shouldn't surprise me much. After all, I'd expect it in Catalan. "M'heu de visitar" sounds more natural to me than "Heu de visitar-me" (which, ironically, sounds castilianised). The crucial difference, however, is that the link in this case is de and I'm used to seeing clitics clamber over it. Me acaban de visitar sounds every bit as unexceptional as Acaban de visitarme. But what exactly is different about the role of que in tenir que from the role of de in acabar de or a in ir a? I should know much better than to get hung up on a word's function in constructions other than the one under consideration. Either way, we're dealing with an infinitive clause, right?

There's more to consider here, but I need a night's rest to do it.

Last night I finished reading Roberto Bolaño's Amuleto. Two weeks for 144 pages--I actually feel pretty good about that. After all, with few exceptions I read it only during my brief commute to and from work. This was a deliberate choice because--as I told monshu--at home I have my dictionary handy, and the trouble with having a dictionary handy is that the temptation is to look up every unknown word instead of simply plowing ahead, relying on context, and only ultimately looking up those which are necessary to unlock the meaning of a difficult passage or which (like achichincle) stick in your head because they are simply too wicked to ignore.

Essentially, what the author did was take the passage from Los detectivos salvajes narrated by the character of Auxilio Lacouture and expand those ten pages about ten-fold. (I know the math doesn't work out; the print is considerably smaller in my edition of Detectivos.) I found this out from skimming that passage last night and finding that virtually all of the phrasing which appears there reappears in Amuleto. The expansion consists mostly of the introduction of characters and incident, as the original passage concerns only Lacouture's own background and her interactions with the two "savage detectives", Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. In the novella, she recalls meetings with several other notable figures, such as an encountre with the artist Remedios Varos which almost certainly could not have taken place. (There's a dreamlike uncertainty to much of what occurs in the work, even in those passages which aren't explicitly presented as dreams or visions.)

Not having read the longer novel, I'm not certain that Auxilio Lacouture is the character in it whose story I would most want to hear in more detail, but it's a story I enjoyed nonetheless. She's an engaging (unreliable) narrator, with a lot of humour, some of it self-aware and some dramatically ironic. Most of all, I appreciate Bolaño's commitment to the limitations of first-person non-omniscient narration. What Lacouture doesn't know about, we don't see. The closest he comes to violating this is in the confrontation between Belano and the Rey de los Putos. Lacouture sneaks into the room to observe, but there's no gimmick by which she remains invisible, rather she's immediately discovered, though disregarded. Furthermore, the dialogue is presented largely in indirect speech instead of recorded word-for-word as if this were a screenplay rather than a novella.

As an additional bonus, the fact that the entire novella is in the form of a chatty monologue is valuable from a linguistic point of view. Not only does it make the prose less dense than in a more deliberately literary style (although Lacouture is hardly an uncultured voice), but it also leaves me feeling secure in the assumption that most of the turns of phrase I picked up here I could drop into conversation without sounding like a pretentious prick. (That is, moreso than I do normally.) In particular, there were three novel points of syntax I picked up from this work, but I think those would be better handled in an entry of their own.

When monshu came back from dinner out with an old friend a couple Saturday's back, I asked a friendly question about the man's sex life and was surprised to find that the answer was "plenty o' nuthin'". Or, as the Old Man put it, "In the evenings, he plays piano or reads a book. He says he's gotten through 26 since the beginning of the year."

I have to admit to some envy there. I've bought at least half again as many books in that time span and read maybe a tenth. Too much time on the computer: That's my undoing. There's only so much I can get through in the forty total minutes or so of my daily commute, particularly when I choose a lengthy and dense book like Jacobs' The death and life of great American cities or something in one of my weaker languages, like Irish. (Nuphy asked me last night what I thought of Colfer's debut novel and, bambaiste mo chuid tubaiste, did he get an earful!)

So one positive consequence of last weekend's ignominious disappointment was that it got me reading Spanish again. The pre-game programmes on Univisión were tedious, so I reached for Bolaño's Amuleto to prime me for a charla that never came. It's my ambition to tackle his Detectivos salvajes this year, but that's over 400 pages, not to mention a tour-de-force featuring a dozen different dialects of Spanish and apparently some metaphysical discussion of poetry. Amuleto, por otro lado is a 144-page novela told in a single voice, and set in Mexico to boot. As a bonus, there's overlap of characters between it and Detectivos, so it seemed perfect for moistening my socks.

So far, I'm pleasantly surprised by how intelligible the prose is. I rarely need to look up more than a couple of words per page in order to follow the story closely and only a few more than that to understand virtually every sentence--an effort that is amply rewarded. Here's a condensed late-night exchange between two characters:

Arturo:¿Y por qué chingados no se lo dices tú?
Ernesto: Si voy yo solo y se lo digo me van a dar fierro todos los guaruras del rey de los putos y luego tirarán mi cadáver a los perros.
Arturo: Ah, que la chingada.
Ernesto: Pero tu eres el chingonazo.
Arturo: ¡No la chingues!
Ernesto: Yo ya chingué, mis poemas van a quedar en el santoral de la poesía mexicana, si no me quieres acompañar, no me acompañes.

As you may be able to tell from this bit, yes, there's more discussion of poetry and I'm probably missing some real brilliance from Bolaño for not having a bleeding clue who Pacheco is, let alone Huidobro. But as long as I have plenty more pleasant surprises awaiting me within these pages, that's something I can live with.

I don't know why I have so much trouble remembering the gender of the common Spanish word for "mushroom". It's a straighforward derivative of Latin fungus, a ordinary second-declension masculine, so this should be a no-brainer, but of course there's isn't really time in the flow of a conversation to derive everything from first principles. Perhaps I'm simply too influenced by Catalan, where a mushroom is never simply a bolet; there's always a more specific term available--in this case, xampinyó--and the Catalans are mycomane enough to use them freely. Of course, champiñón exists in Spanish as well, but whenever I use it, the Latin Americans give me a blank look of incomprehension.

Carlos el Peruano always seems to understand me whether I order "hongos" or "hongas", but I said the latter today and baffled El Chilango so badly he resorted to English. "I don't know what they call them in Peru", he said, "pero en México dicimos 'hongos'". I was a bit bewildered myself, since I didn't think the Peruvians called them anything but "hongos" either. This sparked a little chat about differences between various varieties of Spanish and he eventually asked me, "¿Dónde aprendió Usted español?" Again I was taken aback, because I thought I'd explained already that I learned it in the USA, but that I had more exposure to Castilian Spanish than other varieties.

When he heard that, he broke into a smile and said, "¡Vale!" Carlos was listening in and added "¡Ostias!" and "¡Joder!" It turns out that he has friends from back home who are living in Castelló de la Plana, which he hopes to visit some day. Should've teased him about learning a little valencià first!