South American Fiction-Argentine Writers Message Board

I'm just tickled that Philip K Dick shows up in Borges-fans' shared books. We'll have to see whether he stays there for long…

He appears to be gone. Alas, it's probably my doing, since I don't own any Dick... but on the plus side, we've got Stanley Clavell on Wittgenstein. Could be worse!

Thought I'd share with you all that I've just finished an MA thesis on Borges and Walter Benjamin. Very exciting.

Congrats matematichica! My daughter is just leaving for university in a couple weeks. During the course of deciding on a school, we looked at St. John's in Annapolis Maryland. That's a reader's paradise of a school...but probably not much in the spanish.

I'm actually contemplating taking some spanish courses so that I can read Spanish literature in the original. I love everything I find by Garcia Marquez, llosa, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. I need to read some Borges but haven't got to him yet. what should I read? Learning spanish would also help me everyday in communicating with my friends and neighbors in southern California.

Despite having analized it to exhaustion, I must say I'm a fan of the story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Borges. I'm not really sure what collections it's contained in in English, but in Spanish you can find it Ficciones. It's also available on line, for example, in this handy dual language edition. Borges is known mostly for his short stories, which is convenient for reading little snatches at a time. Of course, he's also know for crazy erudition, so that tends to limit a bit his appropriateness for beginning readers in Spanish. One of my intermediate classes did include his "La muerte y la brújula"/"Death and the compass", though.

And my two cents on learning to read Spanish: pick up one of your favorite kid's books translated into Spanish. That way you know what's going on already, and can make better educated guesses. I went with Las aventuras de Alicia aka Alice in Wonderland.

can you summarize the theme of your thesis...i have an interest in both, although i am more familiar with Borges.

jeveezer- if you have the time and cash i strongly suggest you buy both Borges,A Life by Edwin Williamson an extensive and interesting bio with a good historical summary of Argentina and as a companion piece, Collected Fictions by Borges both are Penguin Classics paperbacks.

Thanks for the recommendation on Borges, I'll check them out.

For better or for worse, I picked up a two books to try to read in spanish. Memoria de mis Putas Triste because I liked it in English and it's short; and El Hobbit because I must have read it 50 times in my life and should be able to figure out what is going on even in spanish. I read a couple of paragraphs, then go through it with the help of a dictionary. We'll see how it goes.

Hola everyone, time I stopped lurking I guess. A quick question - I've become interested in the work of Paul Groussac recently, as one biography I've read indicated he had quite an influence on Borges's prose style. Could anyone recommend a collection I could start with, in the original?

My Copper Canyon Press edition of Neruda's "Stones of the Sky" has Spanish on left page, English translation on right. (Quite possibly so do others.) This is a lovely way to begin if you know no Spanish. * Once I read each line in English aloud to a group, and then one of the members "echoed" in Spanish. This was a great success.

hola esta-thanks for the tip and idea...learning hablar espanol is on the top of my list...saludos,bert

A lot of poetry books from hispanic writers are dual-language--actually a lot of poetry books of other languages also. For examples: Jorge Luis Borges Selected Poems. Or my favorite Nicanor Parra in his Emergency poems or either of his two very different collections of Antipoems. I often look at the Spanish side first and try to work that out and then check it against the English side. The results are usually somewhat mixed from got it perfectly to got it somewhat--to kind of got it--to didn't get it at all.

On the topic of translations, did anyone else find the new translations in Collected Fictions weaker than the existing versions?

I have several dual language collections of poetry but wonder if that is the best way to learn to read spanish. I've always suspected that translators of poetry have a harder job and might wander pretty far from a "literal" translation in the maintaining metre or rhyme or their interpretation of the poem.

So I thought it might be safer to use a prose vehicle. Of course, then it's harder to find an interesting dual language book in prose. So I read the Spanish Memoria de mis Putas Tristes side by side with the English Memories of my Melancholy Whores. At least they are both small books!

I read the paragraph in Spanish, then in English, and then consult a Spanish/English dictionary for any of the words I'm not sure about.

For The Hobbit, I've read it so many times that I can mostly follow it in Spanish without the English text open. Why the translator felt he should change Bilbo's surname from Baggins to Bolson, I don't know.

The translator changed Baggins to Bolson because bolso is Spanish for bag.

interesting link on Argentine Lit...on U of Rochester's Three Percent see April 28-29 posts.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php

great list of South American literature in translation to English:

http://www.complete-review.com/maindex/latam.htm

Words Without Borders new edition dedicated to Argentina. Enjoy!

https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/issue/april-2018-argentina-several-worlds-si...