Academic meets Artist: Waves of Growth

In his piece “Translating Translation: Finding the Beginning” through a series of short stories integrated with novice linguistic knowledge, Alberto Albaro Rios discusses translation. He eloquently portrays to the reader the complicated act of translation and how much can be lost if you only translate words, “Language is more than what we say -- it’s also how we say it, and whether or not we even understand what we are saying...Maybe that’s exactly what keeps a computer or a book from doing the job.” Rios begins the piece by explaining that not only do different languages sound different, with different words, different letters, and different pronunciations, when an individual speaks a different language they physically speak in a different way as well. As an example, Rios stated that “English has tenser vowels than, for example Spanish” (Rios, 506). Rios is fascinated by the physicality of language, fascinated by the idea that “words aren’t simply what they mean -- they are also phy...

      In his piece “Out of Water” Costa Rican poet Luis Chaves explores his lifelong relationship with the Pacific coast of Costa Rica and how it has evolved over his lifetime. Reminiscent of how years later Annie Dillard could still see the artful lines from Dave Rahm’s airshow, Chaves can still clearly picture the Pacific ocean at night from the window of a bus on the Inter-American highway. Chaves can clearly see the constant waves crashing on the sandy shore and “branches, seashells, a sandal, corks, and wine cartons brought back like buoys from some other ruin run aground on a new continent.” Then, Chaves describes the importance and majestic nature of being present in the moment, especially with the ocean, “Not so far away, someone is listening to a radio, listening to news of a world that may as well have been suspended a million light years from what is here now.”       In the next section of the piece, Chaves begins to explore waves of his own, mo...

In the first chapter of his book Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, Philip Gerard concludes that creative nonfiction is created not from the stories you make up, but from the stories you find out. Additionally, Gerard explains that effective creative nonfiction is, “Captured with a clear eye and an alert imagination, filtered through a mind passionate to know and tell, told accurately and with compelling grace (Gerard, 12).” As a guide toward writing successful creative nonfiction, Gerard explains that a writer’s “first obligation is to tell the truth” (Gerard, 5). As a creative nonfiction writer, Annie Dillard seemed to carefully create “From The Writing Life” with Gerard’s first obligation in mind. For example, in the following quote from Dillard’s piece describing her excursion with geographer, Dick Smith and pilot and geologist, Dave Rahm, Dillard made sure to note that she was unsure of when or who told her the why the mountain was red “Their rock...