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I finished reading Maya’s Notebook! What a good book. It deals with drug addiction, the 1973 coup in Chile, police corruption and crime in Las Vegas, post-traumatic stress disorder, prostitution–but it isn’t an “issues novel.” It’s about growing up and love, family and the power of certain places: in particular, Chiloé, a Chilean island.
Isabel Allende’s characters and places could teach me or any writer a lot about the art of description. She can draw three personalities in one paragraph. For example, look at this portrait of the narrator Maya, her grandfather, and her grandmother:
If I start talking about my Popo, there’s no way to shut me up. I explained to Manuel that I owe my taste for books and considerable vocabulary to my Nini, but I owe my grandfather the rest. My Nini made me study by force, saying that “the letter enters with blood,” or something barbarous like that, but he turned studying into a game. One of those games consisted of opening the dictionary at random, putting a finger blindly on a word and guessing the meaning. We also played idiotic questions: Why does the rain fall down, Popo? Because if it fell up, it would wet your panties, Maya. Why is glass transparent? To confuse the flies. Why do you have hands that are black on top and pink underneath, Popo? Because there wasn’t enough paint. And so we would go on, until my grandmother would lose her patience and begin howling. (58, my translation)
I told my daughter about the questions game and now we play it too.
I love Allende’s talent for weaving humor together with serious issues. Here a government tries to recover the body of a drowned man:
They brought helicopters, sent boats, threw nets and let two divers down to the bottom of the sea, which did not find the drowned man, but they recovered a motorcycle from 1930, encrusted with mollusks, like a Surrealist sculpture, which will be the most valuable piece in our island’s museum. (437, my translation)
Reading a novel in Spanish is a good way to learn the language, as is living in Mexico for a while, but I will need something else. A class, to give me training in grammar. A self-imposed lesson in all of the forms and expressions of “poner”: poner, ponerse, disponer, puesto . . . After having looked up so many of these verbs and expressions on the way to finishing this book, I believe that if I understood all of them, the world of Spanish would open to me. They’re everywhere.
Another good exercise is this one that you’re reading: translating some of the entries of this blog into Spanish. (Or, as in this case, writing it in Spanish and translating it into English.)
Corrections are welcome.
(Click here to read this post in English)
Terminé de leer El Cuaderno de Maya! Que bueno libro. Se trata de adicción a las drogas, el golpe en Chile en 1973, corrupción policial y crimen en Las Vegas, el trastorno por estrés postraumático, prostitución–pero no es una novela des <<asuntos>>. Es del crecimiento y el amor, la familia y el poder de ciertos lugares: particularmente, Chiloé, una isla de Chile.
Los caracteres y lugares de Isabel Allende podrían enseñar mucho a yo o cualquier escritor sobre el arte de descripción. Ella puede dibujar tres personalidades en un párrafo. Por ejemplo, mira este retrato de la narradora Maya, su abuelo, y su abuela:
Si empieza a hablar de mi Popo, no hay forma de callarme. Le expliqué a Manuel que a mi Nini le debo el gusto por los libros y un vocabulario nada despreciable, pero a mi abuelo le debo todo lo demás. Mi Nini me hacía estudiar a la fuerza, decía que <<la letra entre con sangre>>, o algo así de bárbaro, pero él convertía el estudio en juego. Uno de esos juegos consistía en abrir el diccionario al azar, poner el dedo a ciegas en una palabra y adivinar el significado. También jugábamos a las preguntas idiotas: ¿por qué la lluvia cae para abajo, Popo? Porque si cayera para arriba te mojaría los calzones, Maya. ¿Por qué el vidrio es transparente? Para confundir a las moscas. ¿Por qué tienes las manos negras por arriba y rosadas por abajo, Popo? Porque no alcanzó la pintura. Y así seguíamos hasta que mi abuela perdía la paciencia y empezaba a aullar. (58)
Le dije a mi hija sobre el juego de preguntas y ahora nosotras lo jugamos también.
Me encanta el talento de Allende por tejer humor junto con asuntos serios. Aquí un gobierno trata a recuperar el cuerpo de un hombre ahogado:
Trajeron helicópteros , mandaron botes, tiraron redes y bajaron dos buzos al fondo del mar, que no encontraron al ahogado, pero rescataron una motocicleta de 1930, incurstada de moluscos, como una escultura surrealista, que será la pieza más valiosa del museo de nuestra isla. (437)
Leer una novela en español es una buena manera de aprender la lengua, como es vivir un rato en México, pero yo necesitará algo más. Una clase, por darme entrenamiento en la gramática. Una lección autoimpuesta en todas las formas y expresiones de <<poner>>: poner, ponerse, disponer, puesto . . . Después había buscado tantos verbos y expresiones dichos en ruta de terminar este libro, creo que si entendía todo de ellos, el mundo de español me abriría. Ellos están en todas partes.
Otro buen ejercicio es este que estás leyendo: traducir algunas entradas de este blog a español. (O, como en este caso, escribirla en español y traducirla a inglés.)
Se agradecen las correciones.
A funny thing about being in Mexico: although I’m not taking a class or working with a tutor at this time, just being here is giving a boost to a longtime project, that of reading Isabel Allende’s novel El Cuaderno de Maya in the original Spanish. I started reading it in 2013, I think, and I often joke that Allende has published three books in the time it’s taking me to work my way through this one. It’s the truth.
We own the English translation (Maya’s Notebook), and I could read it in a couple of days, but I worry that that would sap my motivation, and so I plod along in Spanish. Usually I read a couple pages at a time, once or twice a week, just enough to keep ahead of my weekly meeting with my Spanish teacher. Our hour is mostly spent in my reading a paragraph aloud in Spanish, then translating it into English, then our discussing any questions or mistranslations, and going off on various tangents of language, culture, or literature. Then we repeat. It is an e
xcellent way to learn the language. Guillermo brought in a couple different novels; one by Junot Diaz was just confusing, but when I’d read the first couple of paragraphs of Maya (which you can read here, or in English here), I was so captivated by the character’s voice that I didn’t want to stop. So we knew that that was the one.
Last summer, I set myself the goal of finishing the novel by the end of 2015, but could not keep up the necessary pace of 2-3 pages per day. But here in Mexico, I am motoring through at a pace of 10-12 pages at a sitting and have read about 80 pages in the past couple of weeks. It’s just so much easier now. I love her writing, and I can’t wait to find out what happens. And I have time. And Allende’s language is all around me.
During this third day of Women’s History Month I’ve been reading El Cuaderno de Maya (Maya’s Notebook), by a female writer of historic significance, Isabel Allende. My Spanish teacher was shrewd: he brought the book in one day and together we read the first few pages in the original language. It’s been the bulk of my weekly assignment ever since. I was hooked after the first paragraph, those few lines with which the author somehow evoked Maya’s personality, suggested her recent and risky history, tantalized me about her grandmother’s story, and most of all made me want to read her notebook. In English, as translated by Anne McLean, it reads:
A week ago my grandmother gave me a dry-eyed hug at the San Francisco airport and told me again that if I valued my life at all, I should not get in touch with anyone I knew until we could be sure my enemies were no longer looking for me. My Nini is paranoid, as the residents of the People’s Independent Republic of Berkeley tend to be, persecuted as they are by the government and extraterrestrials, but in my case she wasn’t exaggerating: no amount of precaution could ever be enough. She handed me a hundred-page notebook so I could keep a diary, as I did from the age of eight until I was fifteen, when my life went off the rails. “You’re going to have time to get bored, Maya. Take advantage of it to write down the monumental stupidities you’ve committed, see if you can come to grips with them,” she said. Several of my diaries are still in existence, sealed with industrial-strength adhesive tape. My grandfather kept them under lock and key in his desk for years, and now my Nini has them in a shoebox under her bed. This will be notebook number nine. My Nini believes they’ll be of use to me when I get psychoanalyzed, because they contain the keys to untie the knots of my personality; but if she’d read them, she’d know they contain a huge pile of tales tall enough to outfox Freud himself. My grandmother distrusts professionals who charge by the hour on principle, since quick results are not profitable for them. However, she makes an exception for psychiatrists, because one of them saved her from depression and from the traps of magic when she took it into her head to communicate with the dead.
Allende’s first novel, almost incredibly, was The House of the Spirits, epic in scope and powerful in its emotional and intellectual impact. From my perspective as an adoptive Northern Californian–a status she shares–her novel Daughter of Fortune is particularly interesting, because it moves from Chile to the founding of San Francisco as a modern city, during the Gold Rush. Her descriptions of modern-day Berkeley are so incisive (and funny) that although I’ve never been to Chile, I feel that Santiago, too, must be exactly as her words describe it. She has a stunning command of language, poetic yet straight-shooting, with phrases that can make you laugh out loud and shake your head in sorrow at the same time. In 2010, Allende was awarded Chile’s National Prize for Literature, one of only a few women to have received that recognition.
She was exiled from her native land in 1973 by the military coup and the assassination of Salvador Allende (her father’s cousin, or in Spanish, her tío en segundo grado). In an introduction to a memoir, she writes that the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center made her a U.S. American:
I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States. When I watched the collapse of the towers, I had a sense of having lived a nearly identical nightmare. By a blood-chilling coincidence–historic karma–the commandeered airplanes struck their U.S. targets on a Tuesday, September 11, exactly the same day of the week and month–and at almost the same time in the morning–of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic are similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same; I lost a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing will ever again be the same, and I gained a country. (“A Few Words of Introduction,” My Invented Country, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden)
Not having yet read the book, I don’t know why the ironic twinning of these tragedies led to her feeling that she had gained a country. How does one even make a home in the country that destroyed one’s homeland, much less proudly claim that new nationality as one’s identity? If anyone can trace the complexities of that journey in such as way as to bring us along and make us understand, it’s Isabel Allende.
(An earlier version of this post stated incorrectly that the English translation of El Cuaderno de Maya was by Allende herself, and omitted the names of the translators of both books quoted.)
Sermons in Stones 
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