Kristen Hall-Geisler

Category: Translator

  • Kickstarter in the Time of COVID-19

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    It’s official: the Kickstarter campaign for Life Among the Paiutes did not fund. Despite my best efforts, and the efforts of friends, family, and complete strangers who believed in the book, we weren’t able to reach our funding goal. Boo. April 2020 was admittedly a weird time to launch a campaign for a book. Lots…

  • A Translation for the Quarantimes

    A Translation for the Quarantimes

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    I’m working on a translation of Une Voyage autour ma Chambre (A Voyage Around My Room), by Xavier de Maistre, from French to English. He was confined to his room for 42 days in the 1790s as a punishment for dueling, so this is a perfect project for these quarantimes.  It includes his thoughts on the soul, his…

  • Life’s a Beechnut

    Life’s a Beechnut

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    Lesson thirteen brought such useful vocabulary as le verger (orchard), the difficult for me to pronounce yet slightly more likely to come up in conversation l’écureuil (squirrel), and the very unlikely term la faine (beechnut). There were many sentences to write about squirrels gathering beechnuts in the autumn in this lesson, which was actually about…

  • Does the Carriage Driver Have Your Cane?

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    My great-grandmother Velma was not a rich person. She lived all her life in small communities in northern Pennsylvania, teaching in tiny schools, raising a bunch of kids, and running a small farm with my great-grandfather. Not fancy, but educated for sure. The first few lessons in the Shorter Course focused on classroom vocabulary: pens,…

  • Des Mots Gros et Petit

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    That title is “Words Big and Small,” if you were wondering, but I bet you figured it out. I posted on Instagram (@kristen_hg) about my adventures in century-old French, and an online friend in France offered to help me “with the big words.” I told her that it’s not the big words that are the…

  • Tools Old and New for Learning French

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    I’m using a book published in 1913 as my French refresher course, but I’m not against modern technology. I mean, I am creating blog posts as I learn, which are the height of internet fashion in 2019. I am writing these posts on a brand-new Microsoft Surface Pro. I even sprang for the fancy Alcantara…

  • Diving into French c. 1913

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    I spent a couple of days on the intro of the Shorter French Course. It had the alphabet, a guide to accents, and an extensive pronunciation guide. It was a good reminder for how those nasal vowels are formed in the mouth, and now I’m less lazy about it. Or maybe more lazy, actually, in…

  • Velma: Twentieth-Century Student

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    I have spent more than a decade researching and writing and fact checking and editing, so you know I couldn’t just dive into French lessons from 1913 using my great-grandmother’s college textbook without looking some things up. Like, for example, the fact that she went to college during World War I. I grew up one…

  • Shorter French Course

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    For every plan or project I start, three more pop up. Same with books — while I’m reading one, I buy five more. And Netflix — every time I log in to watch one thing, I add two to My List. I am positive that I am not alone in any of these things. One…