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March 5, 2006
Spanish and Portuguese Literature in TranslationI've often called myself a woman made out of words: built out of books is perhaps more accurate, though I think a certain amount of foundational work was also laid by music and film. There's really no good place to start talking about what kinds of reading influenced the development of my thought and character. Chronology is far too boring, so I'll begin in the middle, in late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, still in its counter-culture heyday. Santa Cruz was full of bookstores, used and new, and I'd wander the aisles of all of them with eyes peeled for anything that looked interesting to read. One of my discoveries in college was a series of paperbacks with beautiful covers--the Bard Imprint of Avon Books, now long swallowed by Houghton-Mifflin and, like most fine literature, largely out of print. It was the covers that attracted me at first, and the mysteriously rich titles by authors with complex and unfamiliar names. The series introduced me to what we now call Latin American Magical Realism (or are we past calling it that, and on to calling it somethng else?) and I couldn't get enough of it. The list that follows (with pretty cover images from Amazon whenever I could find them) is largely what I read in that genre in those years. It's an odd and arbitrary collection, not all of it Latin American, some it Spanish, some of it Caribbean. The translators for Bard were astonishing and their names should be recorded: Harriet De Onis, Barbara Shelby Merello, Alfred MacAdam. Amazon.com should be slapped for not listing all the translators.
Posted by kalital at March 5, 2006 9:12 PM Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsPost a comment |
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