Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 24

poem translation

There's a woman from Timor-Leste I follow on Facebook, Esteviana Amaral, who shares beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes touching reflections on daily life. Kirsty Sword Gusmão put me onto her with this video (in which you can hear Tetun spoken beautifully). Since then, I've been enjoying--and sometimes translating--her work. Here is one from last Thursday. ( Her original post )

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(The photo is the one Esteviana shared with the post)

Her words:

Iha momentu balu ita presiza tuur no haree de'it natureza...

Every Protection

A happy kaleidoscoping of events brought me and osprey_archer to the Yiddish Book Center last Tuesday. I'd wandered its grounds before (its buildings are designed to like an Old World shtetl) but never been inside: on Tuesday we took a tour, and I got to see an exhibit the healing angel's signifcant other (... they need a name here... let's call them "the musician") had told me about: "Every Protection: Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Jewish Pale of Settlement" . These are works of art by the ar...

Wednesday reading: A Garter as a Lesser Gift

24 more minutes of Wednesday, so this squeaks in ;-)

I really loved Aster Glenn Gray's World War II retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight. rachelmanija has a great review of it here , which I agree with 100 percent.

So rather than write a review, what I want to do here is call attention to some of the lines and phrases, that, for me, exemplify the wonderful voice AGG uses to tell the tale. It's beautiful language that's not *drenching* (sometimes beautiful language can be like a thunderstorm and...

A beautiful story

Some of you may have seen art by this guy before: he does comics with very realistic birds. This is a story in 31 tweets, and it's just beautiful--funny, profound, and heart-pricking by turns.

Link is to the first tweet.

First image:



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palmas de caraná y chambira

Different palms for different purposes: the caraná palms are for the roofs of the malocas (communal houses). Look how beautiful the weaving is for the roofs:


Photo by Andrés Felipe Velasco, from his page "Tejido Palma de Caraná" on his website Buscando La Raiz

Velasco writes that there are close to 25 types of weaving, representing worms, deer, and crabs, among others.

This 4-minute video shows collecting the leaves of caraná and then weaving them for the roof. So beautiful. The man credited at th...

Frutero ~ an enthusiastic advertisement ~

One of the things I loved when first we went to Colombia was the fruit--so many fruits I had never heard of or tried. And one of the things I loved when we went to Leticia was the fruit--so many *new* fruits I had never heard of or tried--and also: the fruit as ice cream.

For instance, at Helados Nai Pata (not actually in Leticia but in the town of Puerto Nariño): You can have araza (Eugenia stipitata), camu camu (Myriciaria dubra), and copoazu (Theobroma grandiflorum), none of which I'd heard of...

Na Viro, by Gina Cole

This is an imaginative and ambitious book.

What I loved most was its worldbuilding, so rich and overbrimming. It takes place in a high-tech, Pacific-centered, post-apocalyptic future. It’s a future in which people are given prosthetic irises at birth to compensate for damage omnipresent radiation would do to their eyes, and in which the Pacific islands that are protagonist Tia’s ancestral homeland now lie 10 meters underwater. Even tiny wordbuilding details are delightful, like lakescreens, films...

Hot Chocolate Run 2022

After a hiatus, I'm running the Hot Chocolate Run and raising money for Safe Passage, an organization in western Massachusetts that "[builds] safety, hope and justice for families who have lived with domestic violence." As I did in 2018 , this year I'm collecting wishes to run with. You don't have to be a donor to make a wish--just post it here, and I'll run with it attached to me ( like this ).

This year Wakanomori and I are doing this as a team, so ...

here is a link to our team page .

I do have a p...

Preparation of fariña among the Tikuna

This is one thing I want to go back to the Amazon for: to join in in this (if there was a community that wouldn't mind that). The screenshots here are taken from a gorgeous 21-minute video made by the Department of Intangible Heritage of Peru's Ministry of Culture (the Tikuna/Ticuna/Magüta people's ancestral lands encompass portions of Peru, Colombia, and Brazil).

Here's a link to that video: Uí, preparación y vigencia de la fariña entre los ticuna

It starts by situating us in relation to the fore...

Best friend?

I started to post this as a tweet and then thought, This is ridiculous; there are too many aspects to the question and too many long potential answers. So I'm putting it here!

When you were little, did you have best friends? Did you have several at the same time, or only one at a time? Or did you not use that term?

If you did use it, do you continue to now? If not, what changed, do you think? If you're someone with one or more life partners, how does having that person or people figure into the e...