Page 99...

A couple of days ago I found a cheap paperback ( Penguin) of the English version of Love in the time of Cholera by Marquez. Cheap as chips at £1.49 !

As I generally do, I had a flick through to get the "feel" of the book, to see if it was the sort of thing I would like.

Fashionably, I then did the " Page 99" test...apparently page 99 is the one to look at to get a good idea if you will like it.

Well, I did like it.

And now I am going to turn it into a Dual-Language book by getting the Spanish version... in fact it is winging ( or probably training or lorrying) its way to me right now.



To beginners like me it is a fantastic help to have both versions... even if they happen to be separate books. Us starters can often get bogged down in tricky idiomatic phrases, or a complex paragraph of tricky sentences and/or words you can't find the meaning of, or local dialect words...and this can hold you up and be very frustrating.... then you start to run yourself down and think you are an idiot... then you get fed up and think you will never get anywhere... and so it goes on.

This cycle of despair is not good for the psyche!



EXAMPLE... When I was reading El misterio de la cripta embrujada, I got completely bogged down with the first 2-3 pages. There were various words I couldn't find in my dictionaries, I thought my translation must be wonky because it didn't seem to make sense, a character called Dr Chilfurga suddenly appeared and I couldn't work out what he had to do with it etc.

Now, had I had the English version, which I didn't, I could have sorted it all out, learned the new words, got the general idea of what was going on and launched into the next few pages thoroughly refreshed.

Another plus point with reading famous books like this, is that they often come out as films... which this has, and there are often books ABOUT them, which there are for El Amor....





Now here's a simple bit of music with an understated acoustic version by Satin Dolls of their song Luces...



here's the words from musica.com

Solo veo oscuridad
y no se como sonreir,
solo siento dolor,
no encuentro la felicidad.

*CORO*
Se que hay, algo mas,
y no se como encontrar,
las luces, oh oh oh, luces, oh oh oh.

No dejo de llorar
y no se como llenarme,
no dejo de llorar,
lo unico que siento es vacio.

*CORO*
Se que hay, algo mas,
y no se como encontrar,
las luces, oh oh oh, luces, oh oh oh.

Fuente: musica.com
Letra añadida por dianadolls


And here for your entertainment is a Satin Dolls interview thingy...