More. Solitude. Together.
Today is Cervantes's birthday, and very nearly the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month, so a prof on campus had a public reading of the first chapter of Cien años de soledad.
The group sat in a circle on comfy couches, eating chocolates (my favorite = dark chocolate with chunks of oranges).
People jumped in and out of the reading, as they felt like it. It switched off between English and Spanish; I read along in Spanish but never had the courage to read out loud.
God, it was so beautiful in Spanish.
Afterward, the group had a discussion about time as a circle, ice and freezing time, and restarting the story of the settlement of Latin America.
I never knew "Macondo," the name of the fantasy place all Garcia-Marquez's stories are set in, was the word for "banana" in an indigenous African language. I know that one of his other novels has a riot over banana production in it... but I can't remember which one. I've read most of them, but they all blend together, like a series of dreams.
And bringing an African word to this fantasy town makes me think of the woman Dr. Juvenal Urbino cheats with in Amor en el tiempo de cholera, who is Afro-Carribean.
All characters are supposed to be equidistant from each other. I see it now.
The group sat in a circle on comfy couches, eating chocolates (my favorite = dark chocolate with chunks of oranges).
People jumped in and out of the reading, as they felt like it. It switched off between English and Spanish; I read along in Spanish but never had the courage to read out loud.
God, it was so beautiful in Spanish.
Afterward, the group had a discussion about time as a circle, ice and freezing time, and restarting the story of the settlement of Latin America.
I never knew "Macondo," the name of the fantasy place all Garcia-Marquez's stories are set in, was the word for "banana" in an indigenous African language. I know that one of his other novels has a riot over banana production in it... but I can't remember which one. I've read most of them, but they all blend together, like a series of dreams.
And bringing an African word to this fantasy town makes me think of the woman Dr. Juvenal Urbino cheats with in Amor en el tiempo de cholera, who is Afro-Carribean.
All characters are supposed to be equidistant from each other. I see it now.