La Língua, La Lengua

    When I got back last Wednesday from Thanksgiving break I finished the reading guide questions for Salgado Maranhão's poetry collection, Blood of the Sun. I came up with ten questions in total. I really enjoyed creating them. I felt like a professor trying to incite a class discussion. I asked about the imagery within the poetry, the title and contextualized the poet himself. I am still waiting to discuss them with the Marketing manager who asked me to complete the project. But eventually the questions will be posted on the Milkweed website.
      It was virtually impossible to find any information or interviews on Maranhão, in anything other than Portuguese. I didn't even find anything in Spanish which was surprising, because he is well-renowned in much of Latin America. Due to my fluency in Spanish I was able to understand about eighty percent of the Portuguese entries that I read about him. However, when I listened to an interview of his I only understood at most, about twenty percent of what he was saying. I assume that this is because Portuguese is not as phonetically straightforward as Spanish. In Spanish essentially every syllable is pronounced and sounds exactly as it looks. But obviously not all languages function this way. Also, there are different regional accents that create large variations in how a language is spoken.
       I am going to be taking accelerated introduction to Portuguese next semester, after I complete my internship with Milkweed, which is very inopportune timing for this project. It would be fascinating to read Maranhão's poetry in its original form because , unfortunately, I feel that something is always lost in translation. Different languages often have very different sensibilities, which usually reflect the culture from which they originate. For example, in Spanish there are three different expressions for love and in English there are numerous words to describe currency. I feel that this is very indicative of the societies from which these languages spring. Idiomatic expressions are also almost always impossible to translate. If one translated 'It's raining cats and dogs' verbatim into Spanish, the speaker would sound deranged. The nuances of language have always enthralled me, I wish I could use those skills more at Milkweed. But I'm sure that they will be very relevant in future jobs that I may have.