When I was going to travel to Spain for the first time, I picked up a copy of one of the Harry Potter books to try to remember my high school Spanish. Heck, I had four years of Spanish classes… in the 1980’s… and I should be able to make it through a kid’s book, right?
Oops, mistake. Harry Potter books have lots of words that they didn’t teach me in Spanish class-warlock, magic wand, etc-and I spent most of my time leafing through a dictionary trying to find what the words meant.
Ok, time to try again. This time, I’ve got a copy of “El Club Dumas” by Arturo Perez-Reverte. It’s a fun spooky mystery, with a couple of separate story lines intertwined. It also uses much more familiar words, and the English translation is great. I’m already starting to see where the translator took some liberties and bumped up the intensity of some passages.
And I’ll learn some new crime-related vocabulary words.
Wish me luck…
