Hola. This is Barbara, your news curator of everything Hispanic. This week I have these three topics for you: an exciting new program for all those who are interested in literary tourism in Spain, the publication of the new electronic dictionary of medieval Spanish (Diccionario del español medieval electrónico, DEMel), and the poem «When you are smiling» by Mario Benedetti.
Meeting with writers
Radio Nacional de España (RNE), the Cervantes Institute and Paradores de Turismo have joined forces to promote culture, notably literature, at the local level. They signed a collaboration agreement during the International Tourism Fair (Fitur), which was held in Madrid in January 2022.
The plan comprises a program of cultural and literary activities to be held in different «Paradores» throughout this year under the name «Literary Evenings in Paradores» («Veladas literarias en Paradores»). They may be held in different establishments of the network of state-owned hotels, among which are expected to be those of Granada, Santiago de Compostela, Sigüenza (Guadalajara), and Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).
The Cervantes Institute will propose a series of writers to be the protagonists of these evenings, in which they will talk with a journalist from RNE. The meetings will be part of the public radio station's programming. All public entities involved see this as a big opportunity to promote local tourism, but also language tourism.
Apparently, the parador of Sigüenza has already some experience with literary events. Last November, they resumed this kind of activity by inviting Raúl de Pozo. The event included a reading/conversation and a dinner with the author from Cuenca.
I haven’t been to the Parador of Sigüenza yet, but I love the Paradores in general and whenever possible I try to stay there. They are usually located in a converted historic building. The few that are in a modern building offer panoramic views to a historic site or a picturesque landscape. If I remember correctly, my last Parador stay was in August 2019 at the Hostal dos Reis Católicos in Santiago de Compostela. It sits at the very end of the Camino de Santiago next to the cathedral and overseeing the Praza do Obradoiro, the main square of Santiago’s old town. The hotel has four wonderful patios. Paradores are not always the high end of hospitality in a globalised sense, but I love their fancy and relaxed atmosphere of cultural heritage, regional cuisine and spectacular location. Unlike mainstream luxury resorts, to my knowledge, all Paradores remain grounded. That’s what I particularly like about them.
By the way, we have finally decided to do part of the Via de la Plata, from Sevilla to Mérida, during the Easter break. As you may remember, we have postponed this hiking trip several times due to the pandemic. We will probably rather be «turigrinos» than real «peregrinos» this time, but after such a long hiatus from travelling we thought we’d take the trip with ease and caution. We plan to stay at the paradores of Zafra and Mérida and family-run hostels. For the time being, we’d rather prefer to avoid shared rooms in pilgrims’ hostels. We hope we’ll have nice encounters with pilgrims during our daily stages. I’ll keep you posted about our trip.
DEMel: Diccionario del español medieval electrónico
Paradores offer you the possibility to travel back in time, sometimes even to medieval times. If you study Spanish, research Spanish texts from medieval times or are generally interested in the history of Spanish, I have another new resource for you. As announced via a press release of the University of Rostock, the Diccionario del español medieval has been prepared for digital access and thus made freely available worldwide for the first time to all those researching medieval Spanish.
The online database provides access to 31,000 keywords (lemmata) with approximately 700,000 reference cards («fichas»). The reference cards consist of the medieval word forms, their respective context of use, source, dating of source, and e.g. grammatical, semantic and etymological information. These «fichas» were part of the previously unpublished archive of documents of the renowned Diccionario del Español Medieval (DEM), which was founded by linguist Bodo Müller (Heidelberg) in the 1970s. When this project came to an end, experts feared the loss of this tremendous archive. Thanks to a grant from the DFG (German Research Foundation) all items could be digitised, stored and made available through an easy-to-use interface. The physical archive is now being kept at the university of Rostock.
Spanish text documents from the 10th to the beginning of the 15th century, which were collected in the DEM research center in Heidelberg, were evaluated for the electronic document archive. The text corpus includes, in addition to fine arts, medieval literary works, many legal texts and translations of Arabic technical texts into Spanish (including astronomy, mineralogy, human and veterinary medicine, pharmacy, botany and agriculture). A second important group of translated literature consists of Bible texts.
Users can evaluate the material in a structured and convenient way according to individual research questions by means of a series of search and filter functions. In addition, the «digitised card index» («fichero digitalizado», «Digitalisierter Zettelkasten») provides an insight into the original physical organisation of the DEM's document archive. However, from an intuitive use of the dictionary that I did, I recommend you first read the reader manual first to make your search more efficient.😊
I guess this digitisation project came along with some challenges. For its long-term character, I assume, it was confronted with quick technological changes and a fluctuation of people involved. It must be very gratifying for the responsible project managers, to see it finalised. I wish I could have worked on project of such a material nature during my studies.
When you are smiling
We don’t know when the pandemic will be over, be we know for sure that spring will be coming back soon to the Northern hemisphere, making our energy levels rise. So, let’s end this newsletter with a lighthearted, yet deep poem: Mario Benedetti’s «When you are smiling».
When you are smiling
ocurre que tu sonrisa es la sobreviviente
la estela que en ti dejó el futuro
la memoria del horror y la esperanza
la huella de tus pasos en el mar
el sabor de la piel y su tristeza
When you are smiling
the whole world
que también vela por su amargura
smiles with you.
Translation: When you are smiling / it happens that your smile becomes the true survivor / the wake left in your future / the memory of horror and hope / the footprints of your steps in the sea / the taste of skin and of sadness / when you are smiling
the whole world / which also ensures its bitterness / smiles with you. (Mario Benedetti: On love, lust, longing & life / Translation by Brenda Noland, as found on https://erdincdurukan.blogspot.com/2020/12/when-you-are-smiling-mario-benedetti.html)
Benedetti is one of my favourite contemporary poets because I admire him for his mastery of colloquial and everyday language that allows for many symbolic layers of meaning. «When you are smiling», for example, is not only a nostalgic love poem but an invitation to an intercultural dialogue between English and Spanish and provides us with a tribute to Larry Shay’s, Mark Fisher’s y Joe Goodwin’s song, which is best known for its interpretation by Louis Armstrong.
This is all for this week. I will be back in about two weeks. Until then, I’ll try to keep in mind Luis Landero’s statement, which you find below. It reminded me very much of Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking fast and thinking slow. In Landero’s understanding, only slow thinking is real thinking.
Translation (mine): «Social networks conspire against slowness, focus and being alone. And where slowness is excluded, childishness and banality appear, because slowness is the prerequisite for thinking.»
So, let’s keep our rising energy levels focused 🥰 . Talk to you soon.