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Garrison & Garrison Books – San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

May 23, 2010 in book review, bookstore, essay, international, translation, travel, used books by Kim | 6 comments

San Miguel de  Allende is the Mexico of dreams.  Old world charm without the glitz of the beach resorts or the overwhelming problems of the border towns.  It’s an ex-pat haven, approximately 10% of the population are foreigners, mostly Northern Americans, but the ex-pats seem to adopt the Mexican culture rather than attempt to change it.  It’s a city of culture:  music, art, religious ceremonies, great food, and, of course, literature.  The library serves as place to lend books and a community center.   The week we visited there was a classical guitar concert, a literary lecture and a Tennessee Williams play.

San Miguel is a town to meander around.  The colonial buildings open into court yards containing stores, restaurants and galleries.  And if the door is closed?  So much the better because the doors of San Miguel are beautiful, so much so there is a book, aptly named The Doors of San Miguel de Allende, by Robert De Gast, documenting them.

Wandering through the streets, we stumbled upon Garrison & Garrison Books, an English language used bookstore.  It’s fairly tiny store with about 8 bookshelves, a book table and a few tattered but comfy chairs.  The flyers for ex-pat events showed the store was a bit of a community center itself.  The store offers the traveler a variety of literature, mystery or airplane reads.  There is also a selection of local interest books, among them said Doors book.  Before leaving for Mexico, I looked for Life in Mexico by Frances Calderon De La Barca the Scottish wife the Spanish Ambassador from Mexico from 1839-1845, a book of lively letters, but was told that it was out of print.  It was sitting on the table in Garrison & Garrison, I was thrilled until I noticed the size.  It was a doorstop book that I couldn’t imagine carrying around all day and then home in  my luggage.  Every time I was in a taxi that drove by Garrison  & Garrison, I was tempted to ask the driver to pause just for a minute while I ran in to buy a book the weight of a newborn child.

Recommended Reading for San Miguel de Allende

Not willing to endure an aching back from hauling around Life in Mexico, I did read two books that added flavor to my visit.  To make progress on the Essay Challenge, I chose DH Lawrence’s Mornings in Mexico.  Traveling in the San Miguel area while reading Lawrence’s essays created a dialogue between what I was seeing and what I was reading.  The essays were written in the 1920s and described a world that is much changed 80 years later, but there was an essence of the place that Lawrence experienced and I sensed.  The courtyard life Lawrence describes in “Corasmin and the Parrots” as he ponders evolution is very Read the rest of this entry »

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Stretching What I Think of as an Essay

May 14, 2010 in book review, essay, translation by Kim | 2 comments

What is an essay?  I heard a few descriptions at a reading of essays from The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata a few weeks ago at REDCAT.

  • An essay is both a verb and a noun because the writer figures out what she thinks as she writes.
  • An essay is a quarrel with the writer’s self or the world.
  • The essay is the reverse of redemption narrative because it doesn’t answer questions, it’s an ongoing argument and asks more questions.
  • It’s a work of art that can change the reader’s perception of self or other people.
  • The essay might not have any function at all.
  • Finally, quoting D’Agata from the book, “I think the essay is a antidote to the stagnancy of writing because the essay tries to replicate the activity of the mind . . . the essay is the equivalent of a mind in rumination, performing as if improvisationally the reception of new ideas, the discovery of unknowns, the encounter with the “other.”

I bought this compilation at Bookshop Santa Cruz last summer as a counter point to the essays in Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay.  The Lost Origins of the Essay is a doorstop compilation of essays from across time and all over the world (other than the United States) that one speaker described as an argument that the essay is a vehicle for art.  The four essays I heard read certainly supported the case for artistic writing:

From 1957 – “Tisanes” by Ana Hatherly are vignettes, some a paragraph, others a sentence.  To date, Hatherly, a Portugal writer, has written 463 Tisanes, approximately a third of them are translated and 15 of those are published.  The provide a flurry of images interwoven with questions and observations that left me contemplative and quiet.

From 1500 B.C.E. – “Dialogue of Pessimism” by Ennatum of Akkad is a conversation between a master and slave wherein the master instructs the slave to an action, the slave instantly agrees in such a Read the rest of this entry »

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Almost Corner Bookstore – Rome, Italy

February 26, 2010 in bookstore, translation by Kim | 7 comments

When I told people I was visiting Rome, several people suggested I stop by the Almost Corner Bookstore.  It sells English books in a cozy shop with wall-to-wall books.  A center table stacks current bestsellers and books with Italy as the subject matter.  Angels and Demons by Dan Brown, due to the release of the film, received the center spot. An observation from a customer who lives in Rome, “clearly Dan Brown didn’t visit Rome before he wrote the book.” For such a small store, they carried an impressive selection of genres, from English fiction and non-fiction to contemporary Chinese literature.  I also noticed several bestsellers in paperback that were still in hardback in the US. [Aside:  This always irritates me.  I finished the third of the Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the  Hornet's Nest, in paperback over the Christmas holidays because a friend bought it overseas.  It won't be out in hardback here until May.]

The atmosphere was fun, when I visited two booksellers were holding court along with a professor from Cal State Los Angeles and an ex-pat who later delivered us to a terrific dinner restaurant.  Their customers are tourists to a certain extent (apparently an Australian Cardinal drops in every time he’s in Rome to buy a novel for the plane ride home), but at least a third are English speaking Rome residents.  Many Italians who read English books because book options are limited in Italian, the publishing world is smaller. The store’s bestsellers are detective and mystery books, even before the likes of Dan Brown, especially if the locale is Italy.  Once Almost Corner buys a book, they keep it until it’s sold.  While the store doesn’t sell used books, some of them may be very old.

Rome was the last stop on our trip to Italy and by the time I reached the Almost Corner Bookstore in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, I couldn’t help noticing lots of the small bookstores scattered throughout the country in both large and small cities.  Finding a native English speaker and bookseller, I asked about the prevalence of bookstores everywhere.  The answer, there isn’t competition.  To buy a book is to buy it at the local bookstore.  There are bookstore chains, Read the rest of this entry »

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Some Literary Links that Started Me Thinking

January 10, 2010 in award, bookstore, translation by Kim | No comments

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Translated Tuesday – Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed

December 8, 2009 in book review, poetry, short story, translation by Kim | 1 comment

wherever-cover-medAfter spending the last few months consciously trying to read translated books, I found the newest anthology by Center for the Art of Translation, Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, the perfect introduction to translated literature from around the world.  The anthology is a mixture of short stories, book excerpts, and poems.  The works are stellar; one after another capturing a haunting moment, the beauty of a life, the isolation of a life alone.  Each story embodies an intimacy that some people believe cannot be translated from one language to another.  When I read a translated book, I often feel like the translator is a person in the corner watching me, knowing but silent.  I poured over the translators introductions to each entry finally feeling like an essential person in my experience was finally given voice.  As a result, I’m excited to ask one of the translators from Wherever I Lie Is Your Bed, Alison Anderson, a few questions.

Alison translated one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have read in a long time, “The Lady in White” by Christian Bobin.  Whenever anyone mentions lyrical writing again, I’ll think of this piece.  I loved the writing so much, I bought the only other book by Bobin that I could find in English, The Very Lowly: A Meditation on Francis of Assisi.  Here are some of Alison’s thoughts on translations and, of course, bookstores:

1.  The writing in The Lady in White is so lyrical, how much leeway do you give yourself between the literal meaning versus the sound and the poetry of the writing?  Which do you believe is most important of the two?

I think, in the case of Bobin, I would always lean toward the lyrical. However, because of the clarity and evocative simplicity of his writing, there is rarely a conflict between the literal meaning and the sound and poetry. English being far less poetic than French, it’s sometimes a stretch, but I’ve usually found satisfactory solutions.

2.  Are you (or most translators) equally comfortable in both languages, and if not, is it better to be the native speaker of the original work or the translated one?

I would say I am equally comfortable in both languages, at least for speaking and understanding, but I would hesitate to write in French, for example… good translators, literary or otherwise, should always translate Read the rest of this entry »

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