🦋 Language as sound
Coincident with my interest in learning to read and understand Spanish, I find that I'm reading a little differently these past few weeks, more sensually and in a less plot-directed way. (This may also have a lot to do with What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?, which in its strangeness has sort of knocked me for a loop...) This is nice because it makes me able to listen to recordings of spoken and sung Spanish which I understand only in a very limited sense, and get the cadences and flow without knocking myself out about the meaning. And I'm finding that I can get a similar thing going with English, of course I understand the meaning of it much better, but I can focus on the sound of the text and the visual/sensual qualities of the scene, rather than on characters and plot, which have been my main focus over the last few years. Today I started rereading Garcia Marquez' Of Love and Other Demons (tr. Edith Grossman), and this is a fantastic book for sensual reading. I'm taking it slow, reading it like poetry -- glad I picked it up. Take a look at the first paragraph for a sense of the story's lushness:
An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst onto the rough terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians' stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles, the only child of the Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mulatta servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
A few notes about it: The epigraph is from the supplement to Part III of Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Question 80: Article 2, which addresses whether hair and fingernails will be resurrected along with the rest of the human body. Huh, I thought as I read this, that's a strange subject -- Garcia Marquez explains in a note at the front of the text, how this book got started. In 1949, as a reporter for El Universal in Cartagena, he covered the destruction of the historic Convent of Santa Clara and the disinterment of the bodies in its graveyard. One of the bodies was a young girl's, and yards of red hair were growing from its skull -- the grave marker said "Sierva María de Todos los Ángeles," and he associated this name with a folk tale he had heard from his grandmother about a girl who died of rabies and was credited with miracles. So 45 years later, in 1994, Garcia Marquez wrote a novel about a red-haired girl of that name dying of rabies. This is an interesting take on historical fiction -- mixing history and myth/folklore freely and without apology.
 (Note that the author's note is part of the fiction, like the dedication of The White Castle -- I wonder though what part of it is true. I'm assuming with no proof that it is true except for the detail about the red hair.)
posted afternoon of Saturday, January 17th, 2009
➳ More posts about Of Love and Other Demons
➳ More posts about Gabriel García Márquez
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Epigraphs
From my understanding in spanish lit class, there was a girl disinterred from a cemetary and credited with working miracles, with long red hair that appeared to have grown posthumously. The fictional part was that the writer's grandmother never told him the tale, he apparently got it from an earlier collection of stories.
posted evening of April 23rd, 2009 by Summer
Interesting -- did your teacher give any indication of what the earlier collection of stories was?
posted evening of April 23rd, 2009 by Jeremy
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At The Great Whatsit, Pandora Brewer 