Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books) - Hardcover

Morano, Michele

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 158729530X ISBN 13: 9781587295300

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2007

Synopsis

In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
    Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.
    Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.

About this title

About the Author

Michele Morano is an assistant professor in the English department at DePaul University. Her essays have appeared in a variety of literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Essays 2006, Fourth Genre and The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, the Georgia Review, the Missouri Review, Under the Sun, the Crab Orchard Review, and Chicago Public Radio’s 848.

Reviews

In 13 lyrical essays, Morano details the personal impact of her long relationship with Spain, beginning with her first visit at age 18, continuing through a post-graduate year teaching English in Oviedo and a series of return trips a decade later. As a guiding theme, Morano uses the rules of grammar to organize and explain how Spain has affected her life. (The word "grammar," she notes, has Latin roots meaning "the process of ingesting experience.") Against a dichotomous Spanish backdrop of stillness and bravado, Morano proves her versaility in topics such as grammatical moods, motion sickness and having (or not) the panache to dine alone. Teaching and being taught provide a recurring through-line. One lesson she teaches is that "language is power," urging her students to "take notice, again and again, until a word feels less like an enemy than like a piece of fruit they want to pick and bite into." Learning experiences include an awe-inspiring jaunt into an ancient cave and a moving visit to Guernica, in which Morano narrates, superbly, the attack that inspired Picasso's famous painting. Having carried the angst of a failed relationship with her across the Atlantic, Morano does not lack for internal dialogue and thoughtful self-questioning; these slick travel stories hide a wealth of lived experience.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Morano has a broad perspective on both grammar and traveling. To her, grammar as language and storytelling are key to understanding culture. Traveler is a term she associates with a way of being in the world. Here, in a deceptively slim volume comprising 13 essays, Morano shares experiences living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students. Readers will long remember this unusual book--because of the author's premise and perspective on living in a new language, to be certain, but also because of the imaginative effect the places she has been have on her. Enjoy her remembrances of motion sickness, hiking and enjoying views of the Spanish Alps, dining alone, witnessing an accident, and getting her hair cut. The final section of the book is particularly memorable. Here, the author concentrates on the aftereffects of travel. What does it mean to retell and understand the stories of our lives? For readers who pay close attention to language, who are drawn to new contexts both on the page and on wilder shores, and who are not afraid to come to a place of insight, this book will provide much satisfaction. Sarah Watstein
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 158729530X
• ISBN 13: 9781587295300
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184