we get press in the Galican newspaper!

Jose Maria from Taberna Ultreia (see sidebar), sent me this article this morning… I don’t read Galician, but I can make out most of it… really nice…  it talks about our visit to Finisterre, the end of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and about our upcoming event, Pilgrimage, May 3, 2008.

word of the day

Esperpento  Miguel from Madrid, writes that this is one of his favourite words…

“Esperpento  literally applies to persons or things that look strange and ugly. One of the writers  that I appreciate more in Spanish, Ramon María del Valle Inclan, made of this world a dramatic genre…..

He defined the esperpento (applied to a person !) as the image of classic hero reflected in a curved mirror… in the Gato Street ( a little street, dirty and without  much lightning in the center of Madrid ).”

 

 

Google del Valle Inclan, wade through all the “buy this book” stuff, and there are a few interesting bios/analyses of del Valle Inclan… an interesting blog by some young grad student in Madrid who also posted a photo of del Valle Inclan hiding his missing arm (can you hide a missing arm?) which had to be amputated after it got infected following a fight in a bar…  

 

http://despabilarse.blogspot.com/2007/01/esperpento.html 

 

Would it be fair to say that political cartoonists are masters of esperpento? 

 

 

Final event for the NICU

Early May 2008, there will be a special event of live music, spoken word, dance and images from the Camino, titled Pilgrimage.  In ninety minutes (no break), we will take you on a short pilgrimage. This will be our last celebration of our trek for NICU babies.  Hope you can make it.Dates, time, location T.B.A.  

Emperifollado

How’s this… Fortunately for her, my eperifolladolous mother lives on a street in Edinburgh that has dozens of great thrift shops.  Edinburgh is the best place in the world to buy fabulous used clothing; she bought me my favourite black coat for two pounds at PDSA on the Royal Mile and every time I go back to visit her, I spend a day shopping thrift store shopping.

palabra del día

So here is a new word of the day which Carlos, my pal in Madrid, sent earlier today….Emperifollado   “used when somebody wears so much clothing, they look weird,” he writes… and the first thing I think of is The Emperor’s New Clothes. The verb emperifollarse means to preen oneself… and the english translation suggests, “dolled up”… but if one looks at the roots, one begins to get in trouble when one learns the meaning “follado”… so I’ll have to think on this a bit more.  In any case, let’s see what kind of useage we can make of emperifollado in an English sentence.        

closer to blood than ink

   Y digo que os dispongáis para oír a un auténtico poeta, de los que tienen sus sentidos amaestrados en un mundo que no es el nuestro y que la gente percibe. Un poeta lleno de voces. Un poeta más cerca de la muerte que de la filosofía; más cerca del dolor que de la inteligencia; más cerca de la sangre que de la tinta. 

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive.  A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink. Federico Garcia Lorca, 1934 (trans. Steven F. White)