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

Michele Morano (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sightline Books | Publication Date: March 15, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Booklist

*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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (March 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158729530X
• ISBN-13: 978-1587295300
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #909,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Michele Morano is the future of the nonfiction genre, March 4, 2007

By 

Kieran Alex Murphy (Jamesport, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

Not since Tobias Wolffe's This Boy's Life have I been so moved by a work of nonfiction. Ms. Morano's economical prose, keenly observed detail and emotional honesty are a triple-threat. The essays work that magic of translating what your imagination conjures into an experience which you feel is now a genuine memory, something about which you and she have secret and sacred understanding. Everyone who has had their heart broken by their crazy boyfriend while travelling through Spain should read this book, and then everyone else should too, because after a glass of madeira or a cup of cafe con leche your mind might trick you into reminiscing about that year in Spain when your crazy boyfriend ...

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Descriptive and Poetic, January 20, 2008

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Story Circle Book Reviews - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

In Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano takes the reader on an unforgettable journey, a treat to the senses. She invites us to explore her thoughts and feelings as she experiences daily life in Spain in the early 1990's, while teaching English at the University of Oviedo for a year. While in Oviedo, she enrolled in a Spanish language course for foreigners or "extranjeros."

In thirteen personal essays, Morano captures the reader's heart with her descriptive and poetic style. Her themes evoke a feeling of familiarity, for her stories are organized around topics such as food, travel, and solitude versus loneliness. "I'm hungry in both body and spirit," she writes. "I crave not just a meal, not just the take-out supper I can carry to the emptiness of my room, but a complete dining experience." One pressing issue during the year in Spain was her longing for the man she left behind in New York.

Morano prefaces her book by explaining that grammar is not simply words strung together to form sentences, but the mannerisms, gestures, and ways of life that accompany language. The book is organized into three parts. The essays in Part One reveal her struggle to learn the Spanish language while living the culture. The essays in Part Two revolve around her later trips to Spain. Part Three reflects her attitude toward travel along highways and how it shapes the individual. Morano's sentiments about travel and saying farewell to relationships are reflected in these lines:

"If you move about in the world, if you live fully and fall in love--with friends, acquaintances, and places and periods of time, your heart is going to break again and again. Each time you say good-bye, you'll feel the ache of impermanence, of inevitability, of your own finite days."

I connected with this book because I would have benefitted greatly from studying in foreign lands while I was studying Spanish as my college major. However, overseas travel and study programs were not as prevalent in the late 70's or early 80's as they are now. I have since made many excursions to Mexico and Spain, although at this point in my life I live vicariously as an eager armchair traveler. I comfortably travel to many faraway places through others' spoken and written accounts.

As I read Grammar Lessons, Morano took me on a vivid tour of her daily discoveries of cultural life and relationships in Spain. The pages held me spellbound, and I wished the journey did not have to end.

by Sharon Blumberg
for Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviewsorg
reviewing books by, for, and about women

5.0 out of 5 stars Much much more than a travel book, December 25, 2007

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df - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (Sightline Books) (Hardcover)

I loved every essay in this book. Beautifully written. Insightful. Entertaining. Thought provoking. Brilliant but never pretentious.