The website of the Society for Irish Latin American Studies is full of information about Irish migration to Latin America. It's divided into four sections:
The Homeland, about the
origins of the settlers;
The Journey, about how the Irish settlers traveled to Latin America, including the infamous
Dresden affair;
The Settlement, about the lives of the Irish in Latin America;
Faces and Places, which has biographies of a wide variety of people,
Mateo Banks, family murderer,
Camila O'Gorman, executed lover of a priest,
William Lamport, 17th Century revolutionary and
Bernardo O'Higgins, Chilean independence leader, who gets a whole subsection to himself. There is also a
list of Irish placenames and much else of interest to history nerds.
posted by Kattullus
on May 14, 2012 -
13 comments
In 2008 a letter was excavated during an archaeological dig of a Peruvian colonial town abandoned for unknown reasons around the turn of the 18th Century. On the back of that letter were recorded several numbers and their names in a dead tongue, lost in the upheaval following the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. Even though this may be the only remnant of an entire language, there is quite a bit that linguists can glean from these fragments. For a brief overview of the findings of research by a joint American-Peruvian research group,
read here. And
here is the full journal article, which places these numbers in their historical and linguistic context.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 25, 2011 -
11 comments
In those years I imitated him, to the point of transcription, to the point of devoted and impassioned plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, is literature. Whoever preceded him might shine in history, but they were all rough drafts of Macedonio, imperfect previous versions. To not imitate this canon would have represented incredible negligence.
From Jorge Luis Borges' eulogy for Macedonio Fernández. Borges' relationship with Macedonio was complicated, as recounted in
The Man Who Invented Borges, a fine essay by Marcelo Ballvé. Macedonio's most famous work, the posthumous-by-design work (he believed literature should be aged like good whiskey) The Museum of Eterna's Novel has finally been translated and published in English translation,
here is an excerpt from the novel (one of the ninety or so prologues). The introduction to the novel, written by its translator Margaret Schwartz, has been put online by the publisher (parts
1,
2,
3,
4,
5). Schwartz also sat down for a
short interview. You can download an mp3 of a
great hour-long panel discussion on Macedonio and a
master's thesis on Macedonio by Peter Loggie [pdf]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 21, 2010 -
7 comments
