Kerraway » Spain & Spanish

Manuel Rivas and the art of signing books

Michael Kerr — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:46:40 +0000

The publisher Harvill Secker held an “International Writing Day” yesterday at Foyles bookshop in London, where contributors included AS Byatt, Joseph O’Connor, Tim Parks and Nicholas Shakespeare. But it was the Galician writer Manuel Rivas who sat longest at the signing table afterwards.
In part, this was a tribute to his performance earlier. A handsome man with a shock of silver-and-black hair, he manages to combine the presence of a rock star with the delivery of a poet. As he spoke, at first about his new work, Books Burn Badly — inspired, if that’s the word, by the Spanish fascists’ attempts to “save civilisation” by
consigning even Plato’s Republic to the flames — he was followed in English by Jonathan Dunne, so fluently that they seemed less writer and translator than a couple of singers who have been harmonising for years.
The other reason Rivas spent so long at the signing table was that he didn’t just squiggle his signature; with a few strokes of the back and sides of his fountain pen he turned each dedication (see above) into a little work of art.

Listening to Global Voices

Michael Kerr — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:18:20 +0000

I came across Global Voices the other day while doing some background reading about Colombia. The point of the site is to shine light “on places and people other media often ignore”. It does a good job at that. Its Spanish section, complete with summaries and translations of blogs, could also prove extremely useful to students of the language.

British writers on Spain at the Cervantes Institute

Michael Kerr — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:33:52 +0000

I went to the Cervantes Institute on Friday for the first of a series of conversations between Paul Preston, historian of the Spanish Civil War, and British writers who have lived in Spain.
He started with Michael Jacobs (a contributor to the Telegraph’s Saturday magazine and our travel pages), who laid into the stereotyping that fills so much travel writing about Spain. He said he would “rather die of poverty” than reinforce some of those stereotypes, among them the notion that “the real Spain is Andalusia” or that the country as a whole is fundamentally Moorish. He had no time for mysticism, and found duende “a particularly irritating concept”.
I thought he was a little unfair to newspaper travel sections, which may perpetuate some of the clichés but have also given space in recent years to those who challenge them — including himself.
But he’s right that many who go in search of the “real Spain”, a place they perceive as rural and unchanged, have failed to record and reflect the effect that immigration is having on the country. Jacobs said he had grown used to the sight of shepherds in out-of-the-way parts chattering into mobile phones. But on a walk recently in the footsteps of El Cid, he was startled to meet a shepherd who didn’t understand Spanish — he turned out to be Romanian. In Jacobs’s own corner of Andalusia, Frailes, he was living in a community that included not only Romanians but Moroccans, Ecuadoreans and Bolivians.
The conversation touched on the legacy of the Civil War, on the question of whether Spain is one country or many, and on the largely one-way movement of travel writers between Britain and Spain.
When asked why he did not write more about the Basque Country, Jacobs said that it was a lovely part of the world but that when he had last written about it he had received emails telling him that he wouldn’t be welcome to return. “On top of my Jewish-Catholic paranoia, the prospect of being threatened by a Basque is not particularly appealing.”
Someone in the audience asked why no British writers were interested in the Canary Islands, prompting Jacobs to point out that Galicia, too, had been neglected as a subject. And why, someone asked, were Spanish writers not examining the weird ways of the British as energetically as everyone from Richard Ford to Chris Stewart had reported on the Spanish.
Jacobs said: “The Spanish have taken a great interest in what the British say about them, but the British have taken no interest whatsoever in what the Spanish say about them.”
Preston noted that there was a similar imbalance in academic study. “There are Spanish academics who think they know about Britain,” he joked, “but this takes the form of wearing dicky bows.”
Judging from this one, the next couple of sessions should be worth hearing. On February 26 Professor Preston will be talking to Jason Webster (writer, among other things, of a bestseller entitled Duende) and on March 18 to Chris Stewart, author of Driving Over Lemons. For details see the Cervantes Institute website under “Cultural Events”.

The Spanish for strike

Michael Kerr — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 17:19:51 +0000

M y regular email arrived this morning from the dictionary publishers Collins with a ‘Spanish word of the day’. They missed a trick. The word is ‘huelga’, which refers to ‘a common phenomenon in some Latin American countries’. The email gives examples of how to use huelga in relation to doctors, teachers and dancers — but not postmen. A huelga is a strike.

The Telegraph on expenses – in 1959

Michael Kerr — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:17:25 +0000

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British railways” were dismissed by Viscount Stonehaven as “dismal Willies”.

He demanded of Lord Silkin: “Where else can you get a mattress, two pillows and clean sheets for 25 bob a night except on the railway?”
When several peers questioned the price, Lord Stonehaven explained: “Third class. I never, except when the Government is paying, go first class.”

Javier Marías on the web

Michael Kerr — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:03:35 +0000

The internet is so much a part of my life both at work and at home that I forget there are some people in the Western world who still manage very well without it — including writers. Among them is the Spanish novelist Javier Marías, who still writes everything on a typewriter. Being out of Madrid recently, in a typewriterless place, he was forced to use a computer, and took the opportunity to surf the net. Thus he saw, for the first time, a website bearing his name, created 10 years ago by a reader to whom, he says, “I seem to owe more than I can ever repay.”
He is less impressed by blogs and forums. In an article published in El País in December, he says:

I cannot understand why some writers have their own blogs and must, in consequence, spend time on them. It is like going into a bar, sitting down at a table and talking, and then anyone who likes can come up to you and unload his thoughts over you or, more usually, his verbal abuse. Or like having a phone conversation in which simply anyone can join in and opine, or heap abuse upon you…
There is little reasoned argument — most of it is more like name-calling in a tavern. There seem to be so many people out there oozing hatred, bitterness and resentment. Not so much in English-language blogs, I find, where there tends to be a more civilised discussion or exchange of information. But the Spanish blogs are a realm of rage, of individuals who think everything is shit, or who devote hours and hours to the study of a writer only to badmouth him, when the most sensible course would seem that of not reading him at all. In this realm you also re-encounter people whom you ceased to see years ago, only to find that time has not made them any wiser, that their taste for vituperation has grown on them with age, and that their obsessions are the same. My peek into this smoky tavern has left me with no desire for further visits.

Notes in Spanish: help with writing

Michael Kerr — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 17:59:33 +0000

I’ve mentioned Notes in Spanish before as an excellent aid to students of the language. Ben Curtis and Marina Diez, who run the site, have recently recruited a Spanish friend, Isabel, to join in the exchanges on their forum and help people with writing Spanish as well as speaking it.

Salvador Dali’s Catalonia

Michael Kerr — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 20:04:51 +0000

What’s going on is usually the first question you ask yourself when you look at a Salvador Dali painting. Where is it going on is usually an easier question to answer, as I discovered a few years ago. The Catalan landscape Dali got to know as a boy — the fertile plain of Empordà and the craggy promontories of the Costa Brava — features repeatedly in his work.
In the narrowest bit of niche marketing I’ve seen for a while, a new venture, Time+Space Cadaqués, is offering holidays in that landscape combining “surrealist art, inspirational conversation and an extraordinary gastronomic adventure”. Guests will stay in a villa close to where Dali lived, be given private tours of his house, his Theatre-Museum and Cadaqués, and be cooked for by Paco Pérez, a disciple of Ferran Adrià, the man behind El Bulli. It sounds like an interesting package, if not a cheap one: five days for 2,350 euros per person sharing – and that’s not including flights.

Spanglish in London

Michael Kerr — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:43:27 +0000

I’m considering having one-to-one lessons to practise Spanish conversation, so over the past few days I’ve been looking closely at the websites of companies offering tuition in London. I’ve been shocked at how poor the English is on some of them, given that they are the shopfronts of the business.

Talk Talk Spanish, for example, says under Where we teach: “We teach on location for Company’s and Individuals all over London and the Suburbs.”

London Speaks Spanish tells me: “These Spanish courses may target survival spanish, in case you plan to go to a Spanish speaking country for holyday.”

Spanish-Lessons-London.co.uk says: “4 skills are necessary to learn a language: although our courses focus on oral communication, we develop the other 3 skills reading, wring and comprehension.”

Yes, I know they are teaching Spanish, not English, but they are selling primarily to native English speakers, so why don’t they get their English sales pitch checked by a native speaker, and proof-read, before they put it up on the web? Some of these firms are also offering themselves as translators. Would you hire them?

Miravete de la Sierra: a virtual welcome

Michael Kerr — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:13:25 +0000

They like their slogans downbeat in the Spanish province of Teruel. First, the local people, tired of being dismissed by the rest of Spain, came up with “Teruel existe” — Teruel exists. Now the village of Miravete de la Sierra is being sold with the line “el pueblo en el que nunca pasa nada” — the village where nothing ever happens.
On a website of that name, a virtual tour of the village is narrated by one of its 12 inhabitants, 86-year-old Cristóbal Sangüesa, who says that this is a place where rush hour comes at around 11am, when people go out to buy bread.
The site, devised by a PR agency, Shackleton, seems less of a serious exercise in rural tourism than an experiment in how quickly the unknown can be made famous. So, while you can help out with the virtual milking of the goats, and buy scale models of the villagers (180 euros each) or roof tiles to help with restoration of the church, it’s a bit harder (at least in any of the browsers I used) to book a stay there.