In 1997, I toured Spain with my Alumni group from D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY. Because I never studied Spanish in school, I was not familiar with either the language or the cultural background of the places we visited. Nevertheless, it was one of my favorite travel experiences. I had picked up James Michener’s book ...
How many earnest high school drama students have poured their hearts into singing “… to dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe … to bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go?” It must be a considerable number. Maybe it’s me, but the words can easily bring a lump ...
The novel City of Glass, originally penned by Paul Auster in 1985, was subsequently adapted into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli in 2004. It closely resembles Cervantes’s 1605 masterwork Don Quixote in the delusion of its main character, and in its author’s intent. The graphic novel version of City of Glass’s ...
There exists a multitude of reasons for learning Spanish – a fast-growing Hispanic population in the US, the increasingly visible Latino influence on various facets of pop culture – night life, film, dance – to mention a few. Others simply wish to learn basic Spanish language phrases in preparation for travelling abroad, to decipher the ...
Spain, at the time of Cervantes, was just emerging from the Middle Ages, later than, say, Italy. It was a time when tales of knights errant and the age of chivalry had just about glutted the market for those who cared about those things. So, Cervantes created Don Quixote, a “different” sort of knight, and ...