Your Lovely Cave Furret, Spoon

when my cat got deadly sick she refused to eat a single thing and it had been days but when i started crying she ate just a little bit, and upon seeing how happy it made me, kept doing it whenever she could.

now whenever im sad or crying she finds wherever i am with a mouthful of food and eats the pieces one by one, every time looking up at me making sure i was watching her eat it all because she knew it made me happy. and it DOES make me happy

My cat grimacing. She had a soft tissue injury to her back that was causing her a great deal of pain. 1st picture was before I realized something was wrong, 2nd picture was shortly after being on an anti-inflammatory and pain killer. Compared to her normal expression, I can really see she is in pain. Especially with the eyes

Waffle House is one of the few chains in America that’s open 24/7/365, and where you can get both breakfast and lunch/dinner options at any time (I have had so many Breakfast Cheeseburgers at Waffle Houses). The food is really good, and people eat there at all times of the day or night, but it’s particularly popular as a late-night post-drinking spot because it’s all that’s open and it’s the kind of food that tastes especially good when you’re hammered.

Part of Waffle House Protocol is that all the servers and cooks greet every single customer as they come through the door. It sounds lame, but I’ve never been to a Waffle House where that greeting didn’t feel completely heartfelt. My mom is a health nut who could barely find anything on the menu she was willing to eat and yet she describes the Christmas Day lunch we had there one year as one of the nicest meals she’s ever had because everyone was so warm and welcoming. That sense of camaraderie gets turned up to 11, of course, at 2 a.m. when everyone’s shitfaced.

The jukeboxes have Waffle-House-themed songs on them (once you have heard “Raisins in my Toast” you will be earwormed forever) and there is an arcane system of hash brown ordering: scattered, smothered, covered, chunked, topped, diced, peppered, and/or capped. The hot sauce bottles say “Casa de Waffle.” 

Once, in Oxford (UK), my husband and I walked past a kebab van very late one night and he said “why do I smell Waffle House”

The location of most Waffle Houses means there’s some… classism that tends to get tied up with Anti-Waffle House Discourse, which is probably lending itself, in part, to this being such a fraught topic. (I’m looking at a map and apparently I was born and raised right in the middle of the Peak Waffle House Density Zone)

And you can tell it’s still bad because they’ve put Ceiling High Plastic Dividers between every booth and blocked off all but like 2 tables at the counter and after a certain point at night? It’s carry-out only. Period. No exceptions.

Anyone who wants to tell you we are fine? I will post pictures of Waffle House not being fully functional 24/7 and go “no we’re not.”

And I fully agree -

Comic idea from my dream: every morning you give your pet People Juice and send em to school. They gotta learn calculus and read Hemingway just like people do

“Tenochtitlan,” by Elisa Chavez.

Cortes’ men thought the Mexica’s floating city must be a dream: stone temples jutting from the water, voracious bright gardens and grand estates.

My sun-worshipping ancestors kept their gods close, heeded their rapt whispers. In their names, they built marvelous canals and walked on the waters.

It shouldn’t then surprise that artists have tried to recapture Tenochtitlan, brooding on the dream journals of Spaniards: they imagine her bright causeways, the lush gardens paving her streets like enchantments.

The Spanish, steely god-mongers that they were, knew well how to deal with enchantment: They burned Tenochtitlan to ash.

Leí que los Mexica ahogaban a mujeres de cercanos pueblos para apaciguar a la diosa de las lluvias. Su templo mayor tenía dos estantes de cráneos.

Mis antepasados que adoraban al sol mantenían a sus dioses cerca, escuchando a sus voces rapaces. En sus nombres, perpetraban maravillas y atrocidades.

No debe sorprender entonces que los pueblos a fuera de Tenochtitlan les daron la bienvenida a cualquiera que prometiera un final al sol cruel, las flores mentirosas, los aguas pavimentados con los huesos de tributas.

El dios de los Hispanos fue el oro, y él les mandó a quemar Tenochtitlan, enviándola para reunirse con las doncellas ahogadas.

Because what she does is honestly extraordinary. 

I have no idea which one comes first or what her process is. But what she shares with the world is a poem, in English, side by side with a translation in Spanish. Only the Spanish is wrong. Or, well, the Spanish is right; the English is wrong. 

It’s a real poem all right, and often a more powerful one than its English counterpart. But it doesn’t say what the English says. She does not supply a “correct” translation. For that she relies on her readers. 

Elisa Chavez says of her project that: “The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

“The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.”

My own great-grandmother was born and raised in Mexico. My grandmother was raised bilingual and my mother is far more fluent in Spanish than she cares to admit (she says she “doesn’t speak it,” but the one time someone really tried to cheat us and retreated into “no hablo ingles,” she was a FOUNTAIN of español). I was the first on my matrilineal side to be raised monolingual, in English. I love these poems because the process I go through, of reading the English first, then the Spanish and guessing at it, and then looking up a proper translation, feels revelatory.

In the 3-and-a-half-ish years since I started the Miss Translated series, I’ve been thrilled to see readers create translations–whether out of their own bilingualism, via translation software, or through friends and family. This is work! It’s not something I expect, and I’m always humbled when it happens.

The one rule of Miss Translation that I’ve held myself to is that I don’t provide accurate English translations of the Spanish. However, if one just so happens to crop up, I feel like I can speak on it a little bit. 

So in this reply, I’m gonna talk about the lovely work that Francisca Cázares has done with this (re-translation? de-translation?), as well as respond to some of the points raised by @worriedaboutmyfern​. ARE YOU READY for: 

Conquistadors??

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, or HISTORY

The Florentine Codex??!?

poems written in the 1500s