Reading the Leyendas de Guatemala by Migel Angel Asturias has been very different from other readings in Spanish I have done. Usually when I read I put a lot of effort into piecing things together, be it plot, characters or even just sentences and paragraphs. I have noticed with the Leyendas de Guatemala that this has been a bigger challenge than usual but I feel though that this is simple my point of view. Reading something that is written with "surrealismo" has been different in that when I try to sync it with my reality, my thought process, it hasn't matched up. In Los brujos de la tormenta primival, reading about how the world came to be and the separation of people from the gods exemplifies my struggle in that reading the story in any language would have been foreign to me. There were however parts that came quicker, such as the problems that came with disobeying "las leyes del amor".
Leyendas de Guatemala forced me to trust what I was reading and to turn off my "nonsense" alarm that I have come to use when reading in my second language. It was a stretching text, but in a good way.
Jake
¡Finzamos!
The Official Blog for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Spanish 4362/Language 7313.
3 comments:
La leyenda del volcan me hizo pensar en la no supervivencia de los animales tras la catastrofe volcanica, en la que solo escapan el viento y el ave: dos elementos que se comparan a los gemelos del Popol vuh, Hunter y jaguar en el sentido que aunque son similares a los humanos en que fallan y mueren renacen en varias ocasiones, a la manera que se ha renovado la Tierra a traves de su historia.
Jake,
How did you do it? How did you turn off the “nonsense” alarm? It sure is a challenge to digest much of Asturias’ writings and make sense of time sequences and events. The lecture today on surrealism helped to acknowledge that it is OK to feel as if you are in a tornado as you read and realize that Asturias’ reading flows as if it was all a blurred dream. When I wake up from a dream I’m not sure if it was a dream or those things actually happened. With Asturias’ leyendas I felt as if it was for the most part a dream, a very real dream, and when I was finished I was left with a nice rush of images of the jungle, animals, humans and some imaginary friends.
I'm usually a very deliberate reader, and I tend to analyze what I read too much and look for a deeper meaning (through symbolism, etc.). With "Leyendas de Guatemala" for some reason I was able to read through it quickly and not be overly analytical. I took it at face value, and experienced it as an interesting visual piece of literature rather than delve deeper for hidden political or social commentary. I saw it as an attempt by Asturias to get in touch with guatemala's roots, and he may have had the intention of promoting pride in the nations rich tradition. Either way it was fun to read, and Asturias definitely provided a unique and interesting visual.
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