Found in Translation

Throughout the entire quarter, there's always been some issue with my intial understanding of the texts. With El sí de las niñas, there was the constant stop and start of the dialogue, and the "wait, who is saying this again?" when more than two people were in the room. With El estudiante de Salamanca, there was the language that made the understanding of every single word necessary to see the picture that the author was painting. And don't even get me started on the colloquial word usage of Cuentos.... While sitting down to read El Mundo, I'm finding that I read a whole page, and I'm SHOCKED I understood it all. Millás seems to have this simplicity of writing that makes it so easy to read... it's almost conversational. I'm having a lot of "a ha!" moments in Millás's text... moreso than with any of the other authors.

When I think back to my English classes from over the years, texts written in the 18th and 19th centuries were harder to read. I can remember trudging through Jane Eyre (my summer reading book for freshman year of high school) at 11:35 PM the night before school started, incredibly frustrated at Brontë's writing. I also remember reading The Count of Monte Cristo, and while enjoying it, finding it very difficult to swallow. While some of these texts are important if we are to gain understanding of the periods and epochs throughout literature, I wonder if while students are beginning to learn to read Spanish (in 450, for example) if it would be more useful to use current texts rather than older texts which may have antiquated words or sentence structures.

I'm definitely enjoying El Mundo, but I'm not sure if it's because of the story, or the fact that I'm not making wordreference.com my best friend for the evening!