Issue #1 – Love and Language
ISSUE #1:
This week’s posts celebrate language and love, and the worlds they create.
CONTENTS:
• Cuento
• Girl is Mother to the Woman
• Native Speaker
• De Espaldas
• Caribe
NEWS AND NOTES:
If you would like to hear Cuento read aloud, please follow the link to Laura Hurwitz’s podcast The Easy Chair. Laura invited me to read the story for episode #98. Don’t mind the alternate title!
Listen: “P.R Story” on The Easy Chair
Cover photo: Puerto-Rican ironwork # 37 courtesy of Bruce Wujcik.
Cuento
This is the name I wish were mine:
Isabel Betancourt
It was my grandmother’s name, and it represents all that was lost to me as a child, and what I have recovered, am recovering. What I embrace, grow into, and propose to myself, to live within every day.
My grandparents came to New York City from Puerto Rico in the 1920’s.
Girl is Mother to the Woman
Girl Is Mother To The Woman was first exhibited at City Gallery, New Haven CT
‘Inside, Outside & Between’
November, 2003
Native Speaker
I know a woman from Colombia whose first name – Betty – is also a common English name.
Betty is very dissatisfied with the pronunciation her name receives here. She does not recognize the softer t sound of the middle double consonant, nor can she replicate it. “ Beddy?” she says, “I am always wanting to know who is Beddy.” She hears and reproduces the English tt sound as dd,
De Espaldas
Thinking and living in two languages is an opportunity to reflect on their differences and similarities. This is rarely deliberate for me, rather awarenesses bubble up or something strikes me when I am reading. In the middle of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘All the Pretty Horses’ (which has dialogue in Spanish) I realized the difference connotation makes.
English is an isolating language, according to linguists, which means its words have discrete,
Caribe
Caribe was first exhibited at The Coffee Table, New Haven CT
‘LANDSCAPES: Before and After Barragán’
April 2002
