One thing Christopher Maurer mentioned that stuck out to me was that his brother Karl and Carlos Germán Belli "both tried to follow in each other's steps" which I thought was an interesting perspective. I immediately imagined Karl Maurer silently and carefully stepping onto Carlos' footprints so as to leave the same foot trail as him. At first, I couldn't understand why Karl chose language that was so uncommon that it was difficult to read the poems through at once, especially when the original doesn't quite do the same. Christopher Maurer definitely cleared that up for me, though, when he said that his brother's translations demanded more from the reader. There was a moment when he quoted his brother saying "poetry has memorable speech," which is when the nature of these poems and the stylistic choices Karl made in his translations began to make some more sense. Overall, Christopher's brother, Karl Maurer, not only presented new perspectives on translation, that readability is not necessarily a priority in poetry, but poetry in general. I came a bit closer to understanding the impact of Carlos' poems that Christopher Maurer described in the reading from last Monday.
The most interesting part of the sections we read of "The Story of the Stone" was in chapter 1 when the Stone, who can speak, explains that his love story provides a freshness to romance that other books do not. Last semester I took an Introduction to East Asian Literature class in which I read many classic Chinese love stories, so I find myself agreeing with what the stone says here. Most of them had a very formulaic beginning, stating the place and date of the setting alongside the protagonist's status and brief family history. I just liked this small detail. As for the translation, just off the surface, despite the occasional unfamiliar term, this story is easy to read and understand compared to other translations of older Chinese texts.
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