The return of Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca haunts us. The Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, one of the most read and loved writers of the 20th century, was killed in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, by Falangist executioners in his native Granada. His martyrdom only added to his fame.
Seventy years later, he re-emerges, radiant with signification, in contemporary works like Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz's Beauty of the Father and classical composer Osvaldo Golijov's new opera Ainadamar, both of which played in New York this winter. And he is the subject of a new work by choreographer Ray Sullivan of the Miami Contemporary Dance Company, The Death of García Lorca, that premieres tonight at the Colony Theater in Miami Beach

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Volver directed by Pedro Almodovar

"Volver" brought Almodovar and Maura back together after a 17-year split. Maura starred in many of the director's features, perhaps most memorably in "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" in 1987.

After that film, the two quarreled and split although they have never told the world why.

"Volver" also marks Cruz's return to Spanish cinema in an impressive lead performance, after spending the last six years establishing an international career in Hollywood.

"I still don't really believe that I was lucky enough to make this film," Cruz gushed. "It was like a gift from God."

The film's title has many meanings for Almodovar.

"There are several returns for me. I've gone back, a little bit, to comedy. I've gone back to the feminine universe, to La Mancha ... (and) to the maternal role as the origin of life and fiction," he wrote in notes for the film.

Almodovar has often said that his addiction to stories comes from listening to conversations between women as a child.

Mostly filmed on location in La Mancha, "Volver" seems set for box office success, at least in Spain.

Apart from the pull of the director and the lead actress, village life is a nostalgic ideal for many Spaniards who moved to Madrid and Barcelona seeking work in the 1970s and 80s.

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Francisco Ayala turns 100

Don Francisco Ayala, one of Spain's intellectual giants, turns 100 on Thursday and, while the decades have undoubtedly taken their toll, his humour-filled, piercing brown eyes let you know he still has plenty to say.

"Mindwise, I feel exactly as I've always felt. Energywise, I'm slowing down," he said in an interview at the elegant Madrid home he shares with his wife, Spanish literature professor Carolyn Richmond, an American.

Novelist, sociologist, moralist and literary scholar, Ayala has won all of the prestige prizes in Spanish letters, from the Cervantes in 1991 to the Prince of Asturias in 1998. The Spanish Civil War forced him into decades of exile, leading him to teach in universities in Argentina, Puerto Rico and in half a dozen in the United States before retiring from the City University of New York some 40 years ago.

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Spanish and Portuguese Languages throughout the world

The Tucson Police Department offers financial incentives for officers and civilian employees to learn Spanish and rewards certified Spanish speakers with a bump in pay.

"There is still a big flow of people from Mexico coming to the Tucson area," said Officer Claude Ralls, who has been with the department for 24 years. "(An) increase of the Spanish-speaking population will (create) more of a demand."

In January, 52 officers passed a certification test. An additional 114 police employees, including civilian employees, receive extra pay for speaking Spanish.

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Spanish and Portuguese Languages throughout the world - Spanish for dentists

In most introductory Spanish classes, you learn phrases such as "¿dónde está la biblioteca?" or "where is the library?"

In a small classroom in the University of Rochester's School of Medicine and Dentistry, 16 students sat laboring over the gerund in "la muela me esté doliendo," or "my molar is hurting."

Among all the courses on anatomy and biology, as well as the required clinical work, UR's medical school also offers Spanish classes. The idea was spawned by med students.

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The Feast of the Goat and Rafael Trujillo

An essay by Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner on the film and on Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

I had thought it was practically impossible to bring to the screen The Feast of the Goat, the novel by Mario Vargas Llosa that was published in 2000 with extraordinary success. I was wrong. First at the Berlin International Film Festival and later in Madrid, a fine movie version was shown, scripted and performed in English and directed by Peruvian Luis Llosa, the novelist's brother-in-law and cousin.
Luis Llosa is an experienced filmmaker, renowned throughout Latin America for his TV novelas (soap operas) and in Hollywood for two adventure films that did well at the box office: The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone; and Anaconda, with Jennifer Lopez.
The performances in The Feast of the Goat were by a basically European cast: Isabella Rosellini; Tomás Milián, a Cuban Italian trained at the Actors Studio in New York City; a splendid Stephanie Leonidas; and Paul Freeman, a fine British character actor capable of conveying with a few gestures all the infamy, ambiguity and pain of a father who delivers his teenage daughter to the elderly dictator so he can deflower her in exchange for reinstating the father's political privileges.
Llosa's film tells two perfectly dovetailed stories, those of the dishonored girl and the conspiracy to kill Dominican dictator Rafael L. Trujillo, assassinated on May 30, 1961, by a group of former government supporters who had turned against The Goat, one of the nicknames the people gave the despotic general.
Aside from the anecdotes threaded through the plot, something even more important shows through in the film: the atmosphere of terror, sycophancy and savagery that pervaded Dominican society during three interminable decades of horror and degradation.

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Spanish and Portuguese Languages throughout the world

Spanish Language - World´s 2nd Fastest Growing Language

Between 1980-2040 the world´s Spanish-speaking population will increase a 103 %, as UNO estimations indicate. 538 million people will have Spanish as first language.

23,45 millions of Europeans (excluded the Spaniards) declared to be able to speak Spanish, as Instituto Cervantes published recently. In 2001, 3,4 million European citizens studied Don Quijote´s language.

English is still leading the interest for those who want to learn a foreign language , and Chinese Mandarin keeps its first position as the world´s most spoken language - 1.000 million native speakers.

Spanish, with 402 million native speakers in 2005, is becoming a popular choice when deciding a new foreign language to learn. Why learn Spanish? 68% of the students take this decision for job-related reasons.

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Spanish and Portuguese Languages throughout the world (Goa/India)

"There was a period of silence in the relations between India and Portugal between 1961 and 1974, and it took a long time to recover whatever relations we had through confidence building measures," said Dr Pedro Adão, Consul General of Portugal in India, at the History Series of Xavier Centre of Historical Research at Porvorim, on February 16 evening. Dr Adão said, "When I arrived in Goa I thought that the Portuguese language was dying here, but I am now very proud to say that it is not so." He added, "Language should be a communication tool and not a barrier. I do not believe that because of tradition alone the new generation is going to learn Portuguese language." He wants Goans and Indians to connect with the new Portugal, and the latter to know about the changes that Goa has undergone.

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Catalina Moreno stars "The Heart of the Earth"

Colombian actress Catalina Sandino Moreno, who received an Oscar nomination last year for playing a drug mule in "Maria Full of Grace," will star in the 19th century drama, from Spanish writer/director Antonio Cuadri, "The Heart of the Earth".

The story, is set around the British-owned mines of Andalusia's Rio Tinto in 1888 and depicts the friendship of two women, one Spanish and the other British, against the social upheavals of the time.

The film will shoot for 12 weeks in Spain and Portugal beginning March 31. The cast also includes Sienna Guillory, Hugh Dancy, Bernard Hill and Joaquim de Almeida.

Pursuit by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Brazilian Chief Inspector Espinosa, in the series by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, fascinates his lover Irene with "the bizarre combination of logical thinking and delirious fantasy that cohabited in his head." A similar delirium infuses Pursuit, in which Espinosa investigates a series of disappearances involving a psychiatrist, Artur Neese, who is being stalked by one of his patients.

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Duck Season directed by Fernando Eimbcke

Forget grown-ups, cupcakes and Narnia - here's your real lazy Sunday. Two teenage boys, left alone in a Mexico City apartment, plan to spend the day playing video games, drinking soda and eating chips. A neighbor girl comes by to use the oven for some baking. Then the power goes out. The boys take more notice of the girl. They order a pizza.

Though the plot may be skeletal, a lot happens in "Temporada de Patos" ("Duck Season"), the debut feature by Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke, 35. Shot in a series of long takes by the steady gaze of a fixed camera, the film bursts with life as the characters move about the room and all around the corners of the frame. The deadpan humor and low-key performances are reminiscent of the early films of Jim Jarmusch, a debt Eimbcke makes explicit by thanking his predecessor in the end credits along with another master of cinematic stillness, Yasujiro Ozu.

For a project that's been described as a film in which nothing happens, it seems packed with ideas about the big issues: what brings people together, what bonds them and what makes their lives meaningful.

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Guide to the Latin American Boom by Alexander Coleman

"Boom" is a term that should have died long ago, because it is such an ugly word. But the word has kept bouncing around in critical journals, mostly because of the jealous detractors who have kept it going. But there are a few things about the Boom that can be said with some accuracy and equanimity. The authors involved are resolutely engaged in a transfiguration of Latin American reality, from localism to a kind of heightened, imaginative view of what is real—a universality gained by the most intense and luminous kind of locality. That is what Garcia Marquez, Rulfo, Donoso, and Fuentes have done, among others. These are the eternal lessons of authors as disparate as Jane Austen, Faulkner, and Thomas Mann. The boom novel is never reportage, it is never blatant political protest, it is never "responsible," in the suffocating sense. And too, the Boom announced a cultural hegemony and unity out of disparity that would have been unthinkable some twenty or thirty years ago. Some elements that aided in this newly forged continental consciousness are such disparate facts and events as the cultural impulse given to Latin America by the Cuban Revolution, and in particular the Review of the House of the Americas, the most distinguished cultural organ of the Castro revolution; the existence of the distinguished Ford Foundation-financed literary review Mundo Nuevo, which, although it only lasted some two years under the formidable editorship of Emir Rodriguez Monegal, managed to introduce most of the authors of the new wave, those of whom we are now speaking. And of course it is significant that Borges enjoyed a retainer from The New Yorker, and that the same magazine, under the aegis of William Shawn and Alastair Reid, has begun a comprehensive search for new texts from Latin America, to be translated expressly for the magazine. And no one is surprised when a Cortazar short story is transformed into a film by Antonioni (Blow-up), or short stories by Borges undergo brilliant radical surgery by such filmmakers as Bertolucci (The Spider's Stratagem) or Nichohs Roeg (Performance). These are details, of course, but these details are indicative of a change of atmosphere, and that is everything. Nothing like this would have occurred in the forties or the early fifties. Latin American literature has gained an enormous readership just in the past twenty years.

The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is a breezy exercise in literary parricide—the old boys are ejected from the pantheon, the local gods are outraged, the whippersnappers take over, a whole new profile for Latin American culture gradually takes form. Jose Donoso is not only a witness to it, he is a fundamental part of this literary process. His memoir should not be missed by anyone who cares about literature. It is a unique and discerning document, done with equal amounts of black bile and good humor. Thankfully, he has been eloquently served by his nimble translator, Gregory Kolovakos. By the way, for those interested in a lucid overview of the whole movement, with an abundance of useful factual material, I recommend Emir Rodriguez Monegal's El Boom de la Novela Latinoamericana (Caracus: Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 1972).

The author adds also a short list of books including:

Ficciones, Personal Anthology and El Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Three Trapped Tigers by Gillermo Cabrera Infante, Explosion in a Cathedral, The Lost Steps and Reasons of State by Alejo Carpentier, The Winners, Hopscotch and Blow-Up and Other Stories by Julio Cortazar, Coronation, This Sunday and The Obscene Bird of the Night by José Donoso, Where the Air is Clear, The Death of Artemio Cruz, Aura, Change of Skin and Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes, No One Writes to the Colonel, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, The Third Bank of the River and The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair by Manuel Puig, Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo, From Cuba With a Song and Cobra by Severo Sarduy, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa.

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