{"id":78,"date":"2010-01-10T20:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T04:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899517629521898262.post-461947744088748416"},"modified":"2010-01-11T02:38:53","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T10:38:53","slug":"asturias-a-feast-for-the-senses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/2010\/01\/10\/asturias-a-feast-for-the-senses\/","title":{"rendered":"Asturias : A Feast for the Senses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Overwhelmed. That&#8217;s probably the best word I can use to describe my experience reading the first half of Leyendas de Guatemala. Understanding the &#8220;core&#8221; of each legend wasn&#8217;t the issue so much as being able to fully appreciate the finer details in each of the stories. The breadth of Asturias&#8217; linguistic abilities leads to texts that are linguistically dense in many respects. Due to the rich vocabulary Asturias uses, I found myself making a trade off between understanding the subtle details of the texts and understanding the stories as a whole. Initially, I was more largely in favor of reading in the former way rather than the latter. However, I was forced to abandon that method of reading in favor of understanding the stories as a whole to keep my sanity, and progress through the reading at an acceptable pace.<\/p>\n<p>Although I was overwhelmed in the sense that the reading was challenging, I was also overwhelmed by richness of Asturias&#8217; writing. As I was reading the legends, I felt like I was being transported to a foreign, exotic world. Asturias poetically describes the sights, sounds and smells of the environments that play host to his stories. &#8220;Y el olor acompa\u00f1aba a las imag\u00e9nes. El cielo ol\u00eda a cielo, el ni\u00f1o a ni\u00f1o&#8230;&#8221; is a passage from Lyenda del Cadejo that is still lingering in my mind. I find this description peculiar and elegant at the same time. To me it was peculiar in the sense you can&#8217;t really describe what the sky smells like or a child for that matter, but on some level you know they have a smell, and how the smell. Therefore, it is in the simplicity of stating that &#8220;el cielo ol\u00eda a cielo&#8230;&#8221; that the eloquence of Asturias&#8217; writing is embodied. Upon reflecting, my experience as a whole reading Asturias&#8217; leyendas is best compared to a mosaic of memorable little anecdotes such as the one above. My memory of the leyendas is studded with moments of pure sensory pleasure and fantasy.<\/p>\n<p>Regretfully, I feel as though my experience thus far is incomplete as the limits of my vocabulary comprehension has hindered my ability to fully extract all of the beauty contained in Asturias&#8217; pages. You definitely need to take the time to smell the roses with Asturias.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/6899517629521898262-461947744088748416?l=wordsonwhatever.blogspot.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overwhelmed. That&#8217;s probably the best word I can use to describe my experience reading the first half of Leyendas de Guatemala. Understanding the &#8220;core&#8221; of each legend wasn&#8217;t the issue so much as being able to fully appreciate the finer details in each&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1623,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/1623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/span365\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}