Zorro - Comienza de la leyenda, Isabelle Allende

I'm only up to page 28 but just wanted to make a quick comment on trying to read in my (hopefully one day) second language. First up, its a giant pain in the arse. But of course, rewarding like most things that require effort. I bought a nice glossy print of the "South American" edition in a frenzied, over-ambitious attempt at immersion in Spanish. Also the shop attendant cornered me immediately after the very sexy poster had caught my eye in Buenos Aires' main shopping mall, and I had a limited repetoir of responses.

Anyway, I'm taking it super slow with of course a companion dictionary to hand. Luckily the edition has nice wide margins as the first 15 pages are covered in scrawled english translations. To begin with I managed 1.5 - 2 pages per night, with perfect quiet and a nice comfortable spot in our apartment. Its an interesting exercise that is a good reminder of what it must be like for kids to learn to read. At first its just a mass of jumbled data, and the effort to unscramble just one paragraph which turns out to be a description of some landscape and layout of a 18th Century mission hardly seems breaking into a sweat over. So I got very disheartened and left it for a month. Now I've tried again in our wintery mountain hostel, and have got to the point where I'm keen to find out the next twist of the story (Allende is good for that), so am encouraged to go again. Having put the pencil away and using a mix of guessing, looking up, asking Chris, and skiping the occaisonal hard sentence, I'm gradually getting faster.

And the most pleasant surprise, being the point of this post, is that the author's voice still rings lound and clear through the text, just like I know and love. Of course, Allende writes her original manuscript in Spanish. Having become familiar with her flights of imagination, her earthy, off-handed descriptions of the foibles of human personalities, rich sensuality often quickly followed by a sharp bit of sature, in English, I am now incredibly impressed with the act of translation in which brings all this through from the original. In this case, its the kind of book I could knock off in English in about a full day and a half of reading (with meals breaks), as it seems to have the rollicking pace of a cheeky adventure story. Also, in plodding along at a snails pace, the mechanics of the writing shows more than usual, because I've got to take the sentences apart to even work out what tense they are in, if they are someone's thoughts, a description, or part of the plot.

So as not to spoil the story.. so far the scene's been set in one of the more humanist missions in California, run by a Spanish monk, an attack by a coalition of the surrounding tribes, defended by the dashing Alejandro de la Vega, and an intruiging surprise.. ! Its exciting and I'm looking forward to the next few hundred pages. At this rate I've calcualted being finished by about August 2007.