Saturday, October 22, 2011

American Còmics in Catalan

This morning while reading LaVanguardia in the Catalan version (to practice my Catalan and because my significant other prefers his native tongue), I paused at the comics page. I  normally skip over this page, but an illustration of a spider sitting on his web with a menu in Catalan caught my eye. Comic strip, Lio, by comic artist Mark Tatulli, shows a spider holding a carta de vins with his two front legs as his prey who is caught in the spider web looks away flustered at his captor's fancy taste to eat him and have some good wine.

Then I read the comic right above it, Calvin I Hobbes, and chuckled at the fact that I never took the time to read a comic strip that I  read every day without fail in the L.A. Times newspaper when I lived in California. In retrospect, I think it was finding Calvin and Hobbes in Catalan that put me off. It some how didn't seem genuine to me. It wasn't my American comic strip in my native language and felt that this new and strange language only spoken in a small region of Spain was stealing my identity, my culture, and my language. And now look at me, I now try to expose people to bits and pieces of this beautiful and enriching language.  Adeu!






1 comment:

  1. Hi:

    I'm Patty's husband, and this is my first appearance in her blog.

    I'm proud of my wife, but you have to know that the "small region" what is Patty talking about in her last arthicle, Catalunya, is not small and is not a region. We have an own culture totally different from the spaniards, and our history rise form the first centuries.
    We don't have an state, we are integrate into Spain, but some day the things can change.....

    That's all, best regards from quiet cigarrete man.

    ReplyDelete

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