Archive for September, 2011

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Like Water for Chocolate

September 6, 2011

In my quest to cure my intellectual laziness, I’m hoping that reading Like Water for Chocolate in its original Spanish will prove to be a watershed moment.

Not that I’ve seen any improvement in my attempt to read Kant.

If you didn’t see the 1992 movie (or just need a refresher), the plot goes something like this: in 19th-century Mexico, during the revolution, 15-year-old Tita falls in love with her handsome neighbor Pedro. When Pedro asks Tita to marry him, their love is thwarted. Her mother (Mamá Elena) will not permit the marriage because Tita, as youngest daughter, is bound by family tradition to be her mother’s handmaid until Mamá Elena’s death. Pedro decides to marry Tita’s older sister Rosaura instead so as to live in the same household as his beloved. This brings about many complications, as you might imagine.

Throughout the novel and movie is an underlying theme of cooking. Tita’s emotions are expressed through the food she makes, and everyone who eats her cooking experiences those emotions. The guests leave Pedro and Rosaura’s wedding weeping after eating the cake Tita baked, for one example.

It’s an entertaining book and movie. Mamá Elena is a wonderful (if one-dimensional) character, Disney-esque in her evil.

Back in 1993, when I saw the movie, Pedro’s actions and the smoldering heat between he and Tita all seemed reasonable. But on reflection, I think I was distracted by the beautiful Marco Leonardi.

Reading the book made something readily apparent: Pedro is an idiot. Not only was it completely stupid for him to marry Tita’s sister, but his constant stalking of Tita, who is trying to move on with her life, borders on creepy. And the poor girl gets no relief even after her mother dies; just when it looks like she’s found real love in Dr. John Brown, Pedro intervenes again. But he won’t leave Rosaura. Nope, Pedro’s going to play it both ways, and Tita, distracted by lust, continues to make poor decisions.

Still, it was fun to read this as a married adult instead of as the unattached, hormonal teenager I was when I saw the movie. Today I would take Dr. Brown over Pedro, thank you very much. He actually cares about Tita and is responsible and kind AND IS NOT MARRIED TO HER SISTER.

I did pick up some interesting Spanish in the course of reading this book. You know how we use an onion as a metaphor for the many layers of a person? The Spanish equivalent is lettuce and its many layers of leaves.

I read a lot of recipes in the book and descriptions of cooking, and one frequent direction was to squeeze broth or some other liquid through a thick cloth. The Spanish word for thick is tupido. Something that is thick es tupido. Someone who is thick is stupid, and the word in Spanish for stupid is estúpido.

Perhaps I’m making up that etymology by combining two words, but I doubt it. This isn’t like the urban legend that Nova is the combination of No va, meaning “it doesn’t go,” which is why the Chevy Nova failed to sell well in Mexico. (It did fine, sales-wise.) That would be the equivalent of claiming that women refuse to see a therapist because they are afraid of the rapist. If women refuse to see a therapist it’s because bitching about our problems to our girlfriends is much cheaper and more fun besides.

Not that there’s anything wrong with seeing a therapist.

Anyway, here’s a link to a Spanish website with a trailer for the movie. I can’t get a direct YouTube embedded link because the movie trailer contains nudity. If that isn’t an illustration of our cultural difference, I don’t know what is. Enjoy!

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Spanish on the Brain

September 1, 2011

Hello again.

It is the start of a new school year, and so I am once again buckling down on my home study of the classics. I rarely blog about what I’m reading, but I am reading nonetheless. Sometimes I’m even reading things that are harder to comprehend than People magazine.

But I still love People.

This month my on-line reading group is tackling Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher who changed philosophy.

I don’t know how he did that, but that is what I’m told. I’m attempting to read his Critique of Pure Reason, and I’m finding it to be incredibly slow going. Here’s the opening passage:

Whatever the process and the means may be by which knowledge refers to its objects, intuition is that through which it refers to them immediately, and at which all thought aims as a means. But intuition takes place only insofar as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, for us human beings at least, when the mind is affected by the object in a certain way. The capacity (receptivity) to obtain representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility…

It just keeps going on like this and getting more and more convoluted. I struggle through each word, and yet my mind is a sieve, leaving me with no memory of what I’ve just read. While I try to absorb each word of each line of text, my on-line group races ahead in their heated debate over this work. I’ve gotten to wondering if they’re all miles above me intellectually or just full of shit. I’m betting it’s some combination of the two.

I felt it necessary to refer to a YouTube video that someone from Three-Minute Philosophy put together using MS Paint for animation. It’s quite entertaining.

I am not alone in my opinion that this is tough reading. To quote directly from the introduction to my translation: “Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, though probably philosophy’s single most acclaimed work, has remained notorious for being obscure and excessively difficult more or less since the day it was published. It has driven some of the finest philosophical minds to despair, or even, owing to the bleakness of its doctrines as much as that of its prose, to the verge of suicide.”

I can’t see myself verging on suicide from reading Kant. More likely, I will put him down and pick up something else.

In fact, that’s what I decided to do last week. I wondered if maybe Kant was so unapproachable because he was German and I was reading him in translation. Those Germans create all kinds of crazy word combinations for which there is no English equivalent, words like zeitgeist or schadenfreude or welzschmerz.  (I can’t remember how to spell that last one, but it’s the one from which Steinbeck derived “Welsh rats.”)

So I thought, “Why don’t I try to read something in a foreign language that I kind of know and see if it’s any easier than Kant?” The only foreign language of which I have any grasp is Spanish, and the last time I studied it was in 1993. I can’t speak it particularly well, nor can I understand it spoken in real time, as opposed to veeeeery slowly. But as it turns out, I can read it.

I bought this book several years ago with the idea that I would re-learn Spanish. At the time I got about two paragraphs in before giving up on it. But I’ve been reading tough stuff for two years now. My brain has been buffing up. So I gave it another shot.

And this shocked the hell out of me: I read it in three days. The entire thing. By the end I didn’t even need the English/Spanish dictionary anymore. It was absolutely insane, like some hidden part of my brain that I had forgotten about suddenly re-emerged. In fact, it re-emerged as some kind of super-brain, because I was never able to read a Spanish novel even when I was studying Spanish.

Unfortunately, this does not mean I can speak Spanish any better. Nevertheless, I feel like a new world has been opened to me because now I know I can read not just English works in their original state, but Spanish works as well.

While this is very exciting, I’ve discovered that being able to read Spanish has not made reading Kant any easier. So the dilemma: which of these do I tackle next?

I’ve never read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, but I do know of its reputation as a fantastic piece of literature and the progenitor of magical realism. And now I feel like I can tackle it in its original form.

I will try to slog through Kant, but I have a feeling I will be turning to Márquez before long.

I want to blog later about some interesting things I learned from Laura Esquivel’s book. I hope I will be able to remember them long enough to write them down. Wish me luck.

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