Reading Murakami in Catalan

 Here's an anti-joke.

Why does Jonathan read Murakami in Catalan?  --Because he doesn't know Japanese. 

Ei, hola. ¿Com anem? Com que avui tinc el dia lliure, aquest matí m’he arribat al zoo de la ciutat a veure els cangurs. No és gaire gran però hi ha moltes espècies, des de goril·les fins a elefants. De totes maneres, si t’agraden els animals com ara les llames i els óssos formiguers és millor que no hi vagis, perquè no n’hi trobaràs. Tampoc no hi ha impales ni hienes. Ni tan sols lleopards.

Murakami, Haruki. L'elefant desapareix (EMPURIES NARRATIVA) (Catalan Edition) (p. 54). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Let's do the four methods of understanding.  Cognates. Well, I know Spanish so "hola" is "hola," Dia es día, etc.. There are cognate from French: mati is going to be matin in French.  Trobaras is cognate to trouver in French.  

Hello, how are we ???. Since ??? I have the day free, this morning I have arrived at the zoo of the city to see the ????.  It is not very? big but that are a lot of species, from gorillas to elephants.  Anyway, if you like animal like llamas? or ant bears? it's better if you don't go there, because you won't find them. There aren't impalas or hyenas either. Not even leopards. 

From context we can gather the avui means today. To get a cognate from a word that starts with ll, we can get rid of one of the l's, like lleopard.  Com anem means how are we doing (going.). I'm going to guess that cangurs are kangaroos. In Spanish it is canguro.  Ossos formiguers is probably going to be anteaters. If a word starts with h in Spanish it might start with f in another Romance language, like halcón and falcon, so hormiga in Spanish becomes formiga. Formiguer would be ant-er.  One who ants. Hi is a particle equivalent to y in French, meaning there.  

I guess a 5th reading strategy would be phonetic / orthographical conventions.  Like a piazza in Italian would be a plaza in Spanish, in the same way that piano corresponds to plano or piazzere to placer. If I see an Italian word that starts with pi, I think pl in Spanish. If the word in Italian is gh, I think of gu in Spanish. Italian doesn't use x so espresso will be "express."

"I  also discovered how important rereading was. It was a rule from the very beginning that I couldn’t simply skip over a sentence and go on, but had to work on it until I either understood or saw that I could not. So, unless I did understand it right away, which happened more often as I continued to read the book, I would have to reread the sentence.'

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 451). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Four methods for vocab

I teach my student four methods of figuring out words they don't know.  

Cognates:  amenazar is menace (threaten).  English has lexicon from French and Latin, so it has a lot of Romance language cognates. 

Morphology: breaking the word down into its parts. Destejer is unweave. Desagradablemente is des agrada ble mente.  Un pleas ant ly.  The word will have a root, a core meaning, and prefixes and suffixes. You can understand amenzar better if you take away the a- prefix.  Like amanecer is related to mañana.   

Context. You guess the word from its surrounding words, or just ignore a word you don't know and go on.  

The 4th way?  Repetition.  You find the word over and over again and eventually figure it out. That doesn't work for seeing the word once in a very short text.   

 

Lydia Davis method

 There's a method of learning to read a language. Lydia Davis has an essay in which she explains how she studied Spanish.  She took a translation of Twain (Las aventuras de Tom Sawyer) and read it in Spanish. She wouldn't look up words in the dictionary, but would guess at the meaning of words and learn new words eventually from context. She would keep a notebook in which she wrote down new words she learned. She could essentially understand most of the vocabulary using cognates in French (she is a Proust translator) and context. 

I had a year (possibly more?) of college German years ago and I am trying this.  I picked up a German novel called Der Junge Beethoven for 5 bucks at a used bookstore. Obviously it is about Beethoven's young days!

For the first few pages I wrote down words I already know. Frau, Mann. Kind. Fenster. Haus, Vater, Mutter, Sohn, Tochter, Gott, Himmel, Nacht, heute, and wrote down others that I thought I knew or could easily guess.  Lippen.  Musiker. I can recognize articles, some numbers. Nouns are capitalized and verbs can be identified.  I understand the syntactic structure very well.  

I wrote down some complete sentences or brief phrases that were transparent for me, of the "Ich liebe dich" or "Wo bist du?" type.  

They live in Bonn. There is some reference to a Hinterhaus. The father is a Kapellmeister of some kind. He is happy to have a son because he can form him into a musician. He gives thanks that Gott in Himmel has answered his prayers.  

I probably have 100 words written down.  I went back to the first page and it was easier to read than on the first try. You want to get to where the most common 2 or 3 thousand words are understood effortlessly. 

Not using the dictionary is key, because the dictionary slows you down (not that I am going fast!) and also shuts down the effort of guessing, which is key. I have used something similar to this method (without the notebook) with Italian and gotten pretty far.  I can read most Romance languages fairly well but German should be a different kind of challenge.  

I picked up a pop German novel (translated from English probably) on a trip to Cuba years ago, which someone had left behind in a hotel room. I could kind of follow the plot.  

***

Here is Lydia's explanation of not using a dictionary, from another essay about learning Norwegian:

"I did not want to use a dictionary. First, it was more comfortable not to be constantly picking up a dictionary, or sitting in front of a computer. Since, at first, there would be a quantity of words on any given page that I would not know, I would have been looking up many, many words, and this would have been a cumbersome chore. I wanted to sit with this heavy book in a comfortable chair, with nothing more, besides the book, than a sharp pencil and piece of paper.

Second, though, and more important, the work of trying to figure out what the words meant was stimulating and completely absorbing. I realized, after a while, that using my brain for something as difficult as this made thinking a very physical act, much more so than the easier, almost unconscious use we make of our brains most of the time."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (p. 430). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Another reason I did not want to use a dictionary or ask anyone for the answer was that, almost right away, this experiment interested me qua experiment, and I wanted to keep it quite pure. I was trying to learn a language the way we learn our own native language from babyhood on up. Words are repeated in certain contexts, some contexts the same and some different, and eventually, over time, with much repetition, we learn what the words mean."

Davis, Lydia. Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles (pp. 432-433). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Think of One

 "Think of One" is an another Monk tune based on the ostinato as motif.  

Cambridge and Oxford

 One person asked me to write an essay for the Cambridge Companion to Spanish modernism. A little while later, another asked me to write an essay on translations of Lorca for the Oxford Companion to Federico Garcia Lorca. I was searching in vain in my email for the invitation to Cambridge, because I thought that both invitations were from Oxford, in my shaky memory. From the Yankee perspective all of Oxbridge is pretty much the same.   

Justicia

 As a specialist on a gay writer killed in the Civil War, I won't be a homophobic Franco supporter. Not only because of that, of course, but that would be major contradiction. 

But thinking that humanities research and teaching should be mainly about promoting issues of social justice also seems wrong to me.  We are often adjacent to such concerns, but if we put them front and center as the main justification and raison d'être of everything we do, then something odd happens. Since a lot of what we do is not directly about that, then our work on a daily basis makes only a trivial contribution to any social justice movement. Most of the research questions that might be interesting will be tangential or adjacent to activist goals, at best (at worst).  

So the social relevance of the humanities is related to only a small part of what we do, and to make that the whole enchilada risks destroying the humanities completely, making most research questions seem trivial. 

A related problem is that we are after nuance and complexity, and the goals of woke movements can be expressed  in  3 or 4 word slogans.