Found in translation

As I was deciding what to read for National Hispanic Heritage Month 2018, it occurred to me that I ought to read some Sandra Cisneros. In Spanish courses in college I learned a little about her and her influence, but I have really only read some short stories by her. I searched on her name for availability, and titles popped up in both English and Spanish.

It was really Woman hollering creek that got me. That is a short story, but it is in the title for a collection of short stories. In Spanish it came up as El Arroyo de la Llorona.

That's about La Llorona?

The story may not be, but that the title meant it could be changed my perception. I know who La Llorona is. I would be more likely to call her Weeping or Wailing Woman, instead of Hollering Woman, and I feel like the ghostly aspect is significant. Still, I was shocked that I missed that.

That started the idea that maybe I wanted to read multiple works by Cisneros in both Spanish and English. That made it a bigger deal, requiring more time, bumping it to September 2019. I still ended up getting three chances to read the same work in both languages.

The Memory of Silence by Uva de Aragón was not an auspicious beginning. I toyed with whether it was better to read the English or Spanish first, and whether to complete a work first or alternate by chapters. Starting with the preface and first chapter I discovered that I did not like this book enough to read it twice. At all. I still think I learned things from the attempt that will come in handy when I do get to Cisneros.

The most interesting point was probably that the Spanish parts took up fewer pages. Is Spanish more compact than English? However, my other chances to try that this year were poetry, and then the length and volume was the same. To maintain a rhythm, translations were chosen not just for meaning but for pattern. I don't know how much that changes the translation process. I gained a new appreciation for that.

There were two other things that stuck with me, language-wise.

One was from Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

That book was fascinating and timely in many ways, and makes a good companion piece with Leslie Marmon Silko's Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit (which I just finished). However, I think every Spanish student and possibly every language student would benefit from reading Chapter 5 - How to Tame a Wild Tongue.

The other was another title, and it was another translated title: Always Rebellious/Cimarroneando: Selected Poems by Georgina Herrera.

"Cimarron" is a common place name, but in this case it refers to African slaves escaped from the Spanish. It is generally thought to come from a Spanish word for "wild" or "untamed" that derives from an older Spanish word for "thicket"

I thought of "Maroons", a term used similarly, and with the a similar etymology. I had always thought it came from "marron", the French word for chestnut that gets used to mean brown.

I guess I had thought the term was more racially based than it was, though applying a word used for cattle that had escaped and gone feral to darker-skinned people might still be pretty racist. Of course, it could be hard to disentangle the relationship between racism and chattel slavery from the language.

Still, once the word was in my head, I kept coming back to the conjugation. Cimarroneando.

I think Herrera made up this word to suit her purpose. Google Translate says it means cramming, but translates cramming as "abarrotar". I'm sticking with my theory.

In Spanish, there can be some blurring between verbs and adjectives. That construction gives an impression of the rebellion being currently happening, and therefore constantly happening, but it also gives an impression of the subject being described as having been permanently transformed. It's not a contradiction; it's just interesting.

(That book was one of my favorites. I ended up recommending Herrera to two other people before I had even finished it.)

I have described myself as a word nerd before, and I do like word games and play, and sometimes enjoy language for the sheer beauty of it. That is all true, but language is much more important for me is as a way of exchanging knowledge and understanding things.

On that level, language remains amazing.