I am having an excellent semester despite certain problems I can see brewing in one class. Part of the reason for this semester’s excellence, however, is that I am again teaching Spanish literature, which works like a charm. By Spanish literature I mean the great, unknown literature of Spain, a country in southern Europe. This is not the post Spanish Literature II I promised long ago – I do still intend to write that one – but as you can see it is one of my occasional, brief plugs for Spanish literature.
Spanish literature mesmerizes one and all, except quien esto escribe in younger days, because the professors who taught it tended not to see how interesting the books were. I did not specialize in Spanish literature but current circumstances dictate that I teach it now now and then. Currently I have Cuban engineers, Portuguese nurses and computer scientists from Belize requesting that we read more fourteenth century literature. You must realize how singular this is.
In other news, Spanish is hard and Portuguese is harder, despite the fact that speakers of French and German are whiter and therefore have greater cultural prestige. Now my friend the geochemist, who is good at both French and German, points out the difficulties of Spanish and Portuguese almost daily.
Happy Mardi Gras! It is wonderful to have a decent semester for once. I feel completely different. This proves once again that it is experience which gives rise to theory, not the other way around.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I ordered a king cake the other day for my oldest daughter. We have fond memories of Mardi Gras in Bay St. Louis. I’m not sure if it is rebuilt yet.
I love the singular jabt, well at least it was a jab when it was used in Pride and Prejudice by Mr. Hurst about Eliza Bennett and her desire to read instead of playing cards.
I just had a dream (afternoon nap) wherein the Mexican woman was proving that she had feminist credentials. She said, “When I’m bad, I can SEE ten moustache!”
I am in a position to evaluate the Spanish vs German comparison. I agree that it is impossible to generalize. (Polish is harder by far than both–but I struggle with case systems). Some aspects of Spanish are wonderful: the facility with which one can often determine the gender of a noun one does not know, for example, or the relative lack of inflection. I also found that I could “get by” in Spanish more easily than in German, with many fewer verbs. German’s inflections confused me at first, and many students are tortured by the word order issues, but reading entry level German was a great deal easier, perhaps because of the many cognates to English.
The first Spanish Spanish text I tried to read was in the sixth semester of grammar and composition, but before I had lived anywhere where Spanish was considered the native language of elites: Perez Galdos’ _Tristana_. Everyone in the course except a native speaker from Cuba (don’t ask me why she was even in the class, she was hopelessly overqualified) completely missed the major plot element about Don Lope’s “taking Tristana to wife” or rape, as we said in class once our instructor wised us up about it. I found that much, much harder to read than Carlos Fuente’s _La Región más transparente_, which I was reading a semester later in a university course at an institution in a Spanish-speaking country. And when I tried to read _The autumn of the patriarch_ a semester later I had to give up and read it in English.
I have often thought of some exotic language to learn. Lately I have been fascinated by Slavic orthography, and considered the becoming clang and rich resonance of the Polish language. Polish is the most widely spoken of the west Slavic languages,. It has retained ancient features of Slavic pronunciation and grammer. It also has a rich cultural heritage regarding literature and poetry, despite the tragic past of the Polish homeland. I looked for the local branch of the Instytut Polski and found out that there is a rich library over there. Perhaps.
I was sitting in a café, drinking bubbling black coffee and reading Aragon’s La Semain Sainte, enjoying that classic narrative of the post-Napoleonic era. I was thinking about life, the past, the present and the future. My thoughts wandered to the Son of God bleeding on the Cross. I am quite fluent in the teaching of the Gospel, having read the New Testament both in Latin and in Greek. So the languages hitching me on the Catholic religion have been ancient ones, and I was suddenly visualizing the great crosses brought from Europe to faraway lands in token of establishing new beliefs in ancient civilizations.
Not so long ago I was reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. It was quite a remarkable book with the wild Caribbean scenery populated with colourful characters engaged in florid love affaires. The variety of characters of different races and colours living their wild lives in the tropic ambiance was very attractive to me. I decided to learn Spanish.
I considered all the Latin American culture of the countries previously controlled by the Spanish empire. Countries such as Uruguay and Venezuela which have celebrated writers such as Juan Zorrilla de San Martín, Carlos Martínez Moreno, Jorge Majfud, Rómulo Gallegos, Salvador Garmendia, but olso writers from the Spanish Siglo de Oro (Golden age) such as Luis de Góngora and San Juan de la Cruz, not to mention the immortal Miguel de Cervantes.
I like the Latin euphony of the Spanish language. Words like ultima, proximo, perfecto, and nunca, have drivated directly from Latin. But rich Spanish has words that slightly differ from direct Latin derivation, like alcanzar, puesto and rechazar, for instance, and it is these words with the accent that induce me the most.