David Frye

Property, Progeny, and Emotion: Family History in a Leonese Village:

This article considers, from the historical, demographic, and anthropological points of view the various forms that the Leonese peasant family takes during its development cycle, and demonstrates the importance of extended and multiple family households in an area long characterized by partible inheritance and nuclear family households. Two methods of doing family history, at times held incompatible, are used and are shown to be complementary: a structural analysis of households, based on four household lists from 1920 to 1978, and on demographic data from 1739 to 1978; and an interpretive analysis of the lived reality of the Leonese household, based on ethnographic data and on locally held notions of proper relations between kin, as embedded in stories people tell about family histories.

The Joy of Translation

Last year, when I had the pleasure of translating Cuban writer Abilio Estévezs first novel Tuyo es el reino (Thine Is the Kingdom) from Spanish into English, it occurred to me that much has been written about the difficulties of translation but little about its joys. The 300-plus pages of this luminously written work allowed me to tackle one of the great challenges of literary translation: how to find a balance among the various registers of an authors voice, capturing the musicality of the words as sounds (their meter and alliteration) while making accessible the cultural and historical allusions of the text. Working on Thine Is the Kingdom, written in a Baroque style and replete with images from Cuban and European art, literature, and history, in many ways was like solving an enormous crossword puzzle. The solution I offered in one place limited the solutions I was able to use in half-a-dozen others. There is also the crucial task of maintaining consistency across 300 dense pages of artful prose. For example, the reader soon learns that one of the books key characters, La Condesa Descalza (The Barefoot Countess), is about to appear when any one of a set of motifs occurs in the text — the jingling of her silver bracelets, the perfume of her sandalwood fan, the knocking of her cane on the gallery floor, or the simple use of the words loca (crazy) or de burla (mocking). Juggling the variations on these motifs, I was halfway through the book before I settled on my final translation of her appearance in the novels opening sentence: