René Avilés Fabila
The funny little cloud saw that she was part of another cloud, or at least she was very close to that one and to some others; she assumed they were her family, since they had a similar colour and were always in a good mood. She was a cirrocumulus about thirty thousand feet above ground, the kind children believe to be an army of enthusiastic though not combative sheep, while other more imaginative children amuse themselves in discovering the forms of other animals or the faces of people they love or hate.
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Manuel Romero Mier y Terán
I have come to that age where it takes more effort to begin a conversation with your father than to put your hand up a girl’s skirt. Luckily, there are a couple of coffees and two half-eaten molletes with frijoles and cheese between us. There’s also the tablet I gave him as a birthday gift.
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Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Alfaguara
Lima, 2010 (English translation scheduled for publication in 2012)
Review by Ángel Fernández (Gélico)
The adventure narrated in El sueño del celta (The Dream of the Celt) begins in the Congo in 1903 and ends in a jail in London one morning in 1916. It recounts the life’s journey of a legendary individual: the Irishman Roger Casement. Hero and villain, traitor and liberator, moral and immoral, this multifaceted figure was extinguished and reborn after his death. He was one of the first Europeans to denounce the horrors of colonialism. Out of his journeys to the Belgian Congo and the South American Amazon came two memorable chronicles that shocked the society of his time.
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Martin Boyd
I recently had a discussion with another translator about the use of the English word “alien”. Those of us who grew up subjected to the cinematic expression of Ridley Scott’s terrifying imagination would probably be surprised to know that most English dictionaries do not list “a creature from another planet” as the first definition of the word “alien”. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, gives the following as the first definition of the noun form: “a foreigner, especially one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country where he or she is living”. The extraterrestrial definition of the noun comes second. Three definitions are provided for the adjective form: (1) “belonging to a foreign country”, (2) “unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful” and, finally, (3) “supposedly from another world”. In any case, whatever the recognized uses of the word “alien” may be, I would argue that for most English speakers it invariably conjures up images of frightening lizard creatures or terrorizing mutants, and that it is therefore no longer appropriate to use the term in reference to fellow human beings.
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Martha Bátiz
My husband and I arrived in Toronto in June 2003, with our twin daughters (who were two and a half years old at the time), two dogs (a couple of adorable pugs) and one cat (a stray, picked up in a poor neighbourhood in Mexico City), after travelling in our minivan from San Antonio, Texas, where we had been living before. The journey north took us one week, but it was an enjoyable road trip as we were able to visit beautiful plantations in Tennessee and even Graceland along the way. We didn’t know anybody in Toronto, and we didn’t have work here. Our Hispanic friends in the United States and our family in Mexico called us irresponsible. How could we abandon everything we had and head off into uncertainty, with two daughters (and pets) in tow, as if it were all just a game? And in a sense it was: a kind of Russian roulette where we bet our whole lives that we’d come out unscathed; and, luckily, so far we have. More or less.
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Canada’s Minister for the Americas, Diane Ablonczy, will address executives, leaders, diplomats, journalists and entrepreneurs at the fifth annual “10 most influential Hispanic Canadians” awards, being held on Tuesday, November 15 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Bruce Lazenby, the newly-appointed president of the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI), will open the program. Nominations for these year’s awards were declared open in Montreal on July 7 by Member of Parliament Paulina Ayala. Prime Minister Stephen Harper met with past winners last year at his office.
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Martha Bátiz
With so many books being written and published in English, you might ask, why should we care for stories that have originally seen the light in a different language? Consider, however, that literature is food for the soul. The 100-mile-diet may be attractive to environmentalists, and people can certainly live on what is produced locally, but there’d be so much that we would be missing if we limited ourselves only to those texts readily available to us.
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The Images and Words Festival is a true literary celebration spanning language and culture. Those who love good literature will not only enjoy literary works in the Spanish language; they will also enjoy their precise and artistic translations in English and French. Furthermore, Spanish speakers will also be able to familiarize themselves with the literary creations of Canadian writers of other origins through the translation of their work into Spanish.
The practice of translation as a facilitator of reciprocal understanding and appreciation, however, represents only one aspect of the Festival. Other events include round-table discussions in which the creative works of the Festival guest writers will be studied. The literary section of the Festival also offers to the public a great variety of readings of original works, as well as book launches, musical concerts, stage performances, and so much more.
For more information, visit the festival website here.
Paulina Derbez
In 2005, my husband and I took the decision to move from Mexico City to Toronto, Canada. The motivation behind our move was both professional and personal, as my husband had lived a part of his childhood in Toronto, and I had previously had the opportunity to perform in one of Toronto’s major festivals. It was not an easy decision to make, but I personally felt a strong impulse to make a big change. And indeed, it was a big change; much bigger than we had expected.
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At Peace
Amado Ruiz de Nervo y Ordaz is, without doubt, one of the most outstanding poets of the Mexican literary canon. Born in Tepic, Nayarit in 1870, he moved to Mexico City in 1894, where he soon became a prominent journalist and published his first works. In 1900 he travelled to Paris, and later worked for the Mexican government as a diplomat in Madrid, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. A consummate novelist and essayist, Nervo is nevertheless best remembered for his poetry, whose delicate combination of mysticism and melancholy makes him perhaps one of the most emblematic ambassadors of the Mexican soul.
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