Playing with Shakespeare in Argentina

Earlier in the semester, we had the opportunity to apply for several volunteer jobs/internships in Buenos Aires.  I had been enjoying my New Argentine Cinema class and I saw that one of the internship offerings was writing for a Cinema/Culture magazine with my cinema professor, Hernán Sassi.  This seemed like an interesting opportunity and a very good way to improve my Spanish.  I had the interview with Hernán, which wasn’t really an interview as the discussion was in the future tense (“So when you write the reviews, you will be meeting with me weekly,” etc.).  About two hours later, I got the job. 

First thing I learned is that these were not nice, two dedos gordos (thumb, literally fat fingers) up reviews, these were literary, academic, and way beyond my Spanish writing capacity.  The movie I was to review was Viola by Matías Piñeiro, an hour-long film that follows the lives of women in a production of Twelfth Night musings about life and love.  The director mixes the scenes of Shakespeare in and out of the theater, combines Viola Shakespearian with Viola Actual, and loops and repeats scenes and dialogue throughout the film.  I am a big Shakespeare fan, so I was looking forward to getting to study another of his plays. 

How I felt after my first draft of Viola.  (Photo: Katherine Larson.)

The first draft of my review did not go so well.  Hernán used phrases like, “These ideas do not interest me” and “Perhaps when you rewrite this you can make a new file.”  I have had meetings with editors and professors that have not gone well, but this was a new low—all in Spanish, I was having difficulty understanding everything he said but I knew he was not pleased.  At the end of the meeting, I was told to keep the sentence in which I said who the director of the film was, and one other sentence that we were going to turn into a brand new review.  The diamond hiding in the rough of my review was my quoting (note: not anything I had actually created, just something I took from the dialogue) the following line from Viola as she seduces Olivia: “I can say little more than I have studied, and that question's out of my part.”

This sentence led us to the idea of the value of the copy and how an exact copy of a text can be something new and relevant in a new context.  Hernán recommended I read “Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote” by Borges to add another literary connection to my review.  In the story, Pierre Menard sets out to make an exact copy of Cervantes’ text, and the narrator of the story (Borges?) asserts that it is something new and a new feat of literature.  (You can read the full text of the story in English here). 

With serious help from Hernán, three weeks and countless drafts later, I had something that was close to a movie review.  To produce this 500-word piece of writing, I watched two films, read Twelfth Night, and struggled through Borges in English and Spanish.  I definitely cannot write that well in Spanish, so I really have to thank Hernán for all his help making it sound like an educated review.  Even after all of this work, we still don’t know if the magazine will accept the review.  In our last email, Hernán wrote,  “es una revista cool, y tu reseña es cool” (“It’s a cool magazine, and your review is cool”), so we will see what happens.  I am cautiously optimistic. 

Vocabulary Lesson: Chico

In the United States, we are taught what is called Neutral Spanish in school, or a Spanish that lacks any regional flavor or dialect.  We learn the standard dictionary words for items and only learn the most universal grammar concepts.  From my experience Argentina, I know I was taught more vocabulary from Spain and Mexico, which I think has to do with the large amount of Spanish instructors who study in Spain and the large influence of Mexican Spanish in the U.S. today.  (For Spanish speakers, a good place to hear Neutral Spanish is on CNN Español—it’s filmed in Atlanta with broadcasters who are trained to speak without their accents.  If you listen closely enough, you might be able to identify where they are from.) 

One vocabulary word that has been particularly tricky for me is chico.  I was taught that it was a noun and meant boy, particularly someone very young.  Here are two examples of distinct uses of this word that I have learned since arriving in Argentina:

• Chico, adjective: small.  Ex: Tenés algo más chico? (Do you have a smaller bill?)  Asked frequently by shop owners when I buy Diet Coke.  Even though a 100-peso bill is roughly US$12, they still don’t want to give you change.
  
• Chico, adjective: younger or newer.  Ex: Tenés algo más chico? (Do you have a newer bill?) Asked when I try to pass off a bad or old bill to buy Diet Coke.  I always try to slip in these bills with bigger purchases and get rid of them as quickly as possible.  (UPDATE: Thanks to the careful eye of my Uruguayan friend Fede, there has been some doubt cast on this translation.  I am pretty certain this is what I heard.  I asked some Spanish-speakers and some say this is a plausible translation, and others no.  I'll be investigating more and see what I can find.)

Can you guess which AR$2 is the newer and which is the older?

I had heard the first example many times, but eventually figured out that sometimes the same question referred to a newer bill.  So, even though both questions are exactly the same, they are asking very different things.  The process of becoming aware of these meanings has been a challenge.  Now that I know what’s going on and what the shop owners want, I know to try to use small and nice-looking bills when at all possible. 

Update from UCA

My most important class is my Latin America in International Politics class at the Catholic University.  It’s the only class I take with Argentines and is six credit hours.  Even though the title says it’s about International Politics, we really are just learning about the governments and processes of rule in South America.  The themes and readings are fairly interesting, but I have absolutely no background in this topic.  Class is generally a struggle to follow what is going on. 

At the beginning of the class, my biggest problem was with the fotocopiadora.  In Argentina, because of import restrictions and other economic factors, the students don’t buy the textbooks they need.  There are copyright laws, but they aren’t strictly enforced.  Instead, the students go to a photocopy store (think Kinko’s) and request the readings they need.  The employees will then photocopy what you need and you pay per page.  Different teachers leave their materials at different fotocopiadoras. 

I had the syllabus the first time I went to the fotocopiadora, so I thought it would be easy just to show them what I needed and it would be printed.  Wrong.  I was told to search through this computer database trying to find the readings, which were not organized in any way.  I would spend twenty or thirty minutes looking for what I needed, holding up the line and gaining the ire of the employees.  At one point, I asked the guy behind the counter for help and he asked when the reading was published, which I said I didn’t know.  I told him I was an exchange student so I didn’t know the date was important.  “Ah, sos una estudiante de intercambio.  No sabés nada, entonces?” (“Ah, you are an exchange student.  You don’t know anything, then?”) 

I was so frustrated because my problems in class weren’t reading comprehension problems, they were reading acquisition problems.  I can ask for help if I don’t understand the readings, but I couldn’t keep going back to the fotocopiadora day after day unable to find the materials I needed.  There is a point at which I become so helpless that I stop trying.  Thankfully, two or three weeks later, I found out there was a second fotocopiadora that had more of the readings and a staff with a more agreeable disposition.  You didn’t have to search in the database there—instead they had folders for each unit in the class, and you search through the physical copies for your articles.  Needless to say, I am much less stressed and will be going there from now on.