READIN

Monday, June 10th, 2013

🦋 La casa de la loca

My latest translation project is the story "Lavender Mist (1955)", from La casa de la loca. An exciting project, and I'm close to finished with it; I'm planning to submit this story to Asymptote journal's Close Approximations contest.

This book is another that I bought on the strength of its cover illustration -- Rafael Trelles' painting "El suceso inesperado" (The Unexpected Event) pulled me right in. Contents:

1. "The Madwoman's House (1915)" -- Rosario Diaz, widow of the author Alejandro Tapia y Rivera, works on an unfinished story of her husband's.
2. "Glen Island (1900)"
3. "Black House (1904)"
4. "A Few Prosaic Lines (1915)" -- a woman sews clothing to support her family and writes (and translates!) poetry on pieces of a cardboard box.
5. "Lavender Mist (1955)" -- Salvador Suárez visits the MoMA.
6. "Birds of the Soul (1963)" -- After he was released from prison, Nathan Leopold ended his days as a birdwatcher in the Caribbean. Here he writes about the Paloma Sabanera (Columba Inornata Wetmorei), the final entry in his Checklist of Birds of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
7. "Coconut Milk (1988)" -- A sort of repulsively smug New Yorker named Thomas Smith describes his travails in attempting to reproduce a recipe from Puerto Rican Desserts: An Illustrated Cooking Tour of our New Possession by Rose Kilmer (1900), given him by his uncle William.
8. "The Poison Pen (1999)" -- Nurse Belisa Weaver, daughter of an Irish man and a Puerto Rican woman and mother of an estranged son, tries to make some money for her retirement by connecting couples seeking to adopt with pregnant young women.
9. "The Green Man's Interlude (20--)"

posted evening of June 10th, 2013: Respond
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Saturday, June first, 2013

🦋 At the MoMA

Marta Aponte Alsina's story "Lavender Mist (1955)" tells the story of Salvador Suárez, a relatively unknown Puerto Rican painter of landscapes and farmers, visiting the Museum of Modern Art.

Here is a list of the the works Mr. Suárez encounters in his visit to the museum (plus two works not in the museum, which he thinks about, and one work not in the museum or in the story, but painted by the man on whom Mr. Suárez is ostensibly modeled):

• Rodin's sculpture of Balzac.
  
• An unnamed painting by Wifredo Lam of "scrawny figures with enormous feet and rumps".
  
• An unnamed drawing by Picasso of "a Minotaur, having congress with enormous Greek maidens".
  
• The Byzantine Icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help:
  
• The Bather, by Cézanne:
  
• Picasso's portrait of Dora Maar:
  
• Angélico's fresco of the annunciation, at the Convent of San Marco.
  
• The Starry Night, by Van Gogh:
  
• Lavender Mist, by Jackson Pollock:
  
• El pan nuestro, by Ramón Frade:
  

↻...done

posted afternoon of June first, 2013: 1 response
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Sunday, May 26th, 2013

🦋 La casa de la loca

Two interesting articles with regards to La casa de la loca y otros relatos por Marta Aponte Alsina: El cuento puertorriqueño a finales de los noventa: sobre casas de locas en Marta Aponte Alsina y verdaderas historias en Luis López Nieves by Dra. Rita De Maeseneer of the University of Antwerp; and "La loca de la casa" de Marta Aponte Alsina: reinvenciones románticas de un canon fundacional by Carmen M. Rivera Villejas of the University of Puerto Rico.

posted evening of May 26th, 2013: Respond

🦋 at the MoMA

-- Compadre, usted es un bárbaro, pinta como tuviera un ojo en la luna y el otro in Marte. Su pintura no me gusta, pero me ha hecho llorar y las lágrimas son la sangre del alma.

Salvador Suárez to Jackson Pollock (from "Lavender Mist" by Marta Aponte Alsina)

posted evening of May 26th, 2013: 1 response
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