I week or so ago I had a dream that I was “writing a delicious bowl of pancita de res.” It took me half a day to realize that pancita is tripe. Oh snap, said my subconscious, and oh ouch, said my contused conscious; though after a while the latter got to work reminding me that I currently love the Saturday specials of pancita de res at Santa Clarita and that must mean something. (Like what?) Although the wait staff has been pretty steady for the last few years, the cooks have changed a few times. They are always decent, but the most recent person in charge has mad skillz as Ashley and Chad, the mad assimilated preteen kids of patrons, are wont to say to one another. (My god, teenagers and kids of that age are starting to break my heart these days. They are so self-conscious and earnest and awful and awkward I can hardly bear the urge to Take Care of Them or squeeze their dignified little cheeks.) The most recent bowl was burning red, the meat chewy and tender and faintly stinky in that good way. Just delicious. And speaking of uncivilized cuts of meat, a piece of the translation of Iturriaga’s Las Cocinas de Mexico I’m working on:
As we know, the chicharron is the skin of the pig. Once the animal is shaved with boiling water, it is flayed and the skin freed from the body. It can then be either fried with the carnitas to result in smooth little cueritos, or follow a separate long process to convert it to chicharron. Not everyone knows how to make chicharron.
The raw skin of the pig is salted and sweated during the first day. The second, cut into large rectangular slices, and sancocha-ed, to use the customary term. That is to say, it is fried over a slow flame in lard and the resulting hard sheets, practically inedible, are let rest. The third day, the pieces are popped one by one; this last step consists of frying them a few seconds at a high temperature which inflates, wrinkles, and crackles each rigid sheet. Some ten or fifteen seconds suffices. The puffed chicharron is removed, still flexible, and as it cools, hardens to the delicious point we know well.
Chicharron is delightful, but translating is really hard for me. Everything I write feels really clunky and awkward, (though a couple of native speakers have implied that the original language here is sometimes a bit odd). Beside not knowing Spanish well enough to always be able to distinguish everyday usages from the formal or anomalous, I just don’t think I have the right sort of brain for it. I always respected translation as an art, but though it might be something I could do if I worked hard enough. Now it seems almost as remote as composing music. (People can hear music in their heads? What!) I read recently some reference to what’s observable of the process on an MRI (Five Dials?) and as I remember it, translation appears to deactivate parts of the brain associated with other semantic tasks (presumably preventing me from remembering how to express an idea with any fluidity). I wonder if the brains of professional translators look any different. I found an abstract of a study of quadri-lingual subjects which notes that “the number of activated voxels correlated with proficiency, so that the activated volume increased for languages in which a subject had poorer proficiency.” No wonder my head hurts. My poor monolingual brain must be lit up like Christmas tree. Now that Aure has begun, however infrequently, to conjugate his verbs, I am again the worst Spanish speaker in the house. When I speak everything takes place in a hazy but certain present tense. The past means nothing to me, and the conditional I use so frequently in English that it feels as defining as my height or eye color, is all but impossible for me in Spanish. Sometimes V translates for me, but I am usually frustrated by how peremptory he makes me sound.
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An old but always pertinent video of Ira Glass talking about storytelling and creative work in general. It’s downright Emersonian.
A Times article by Joyce Wadler on Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants, which includes instructions for avenging a variety of offenses.
