THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
FOREIGN LANGUAGES
ARE YOU MY MOTHER?
COMIC SANS/
COMIC-CON
UNCOMFORTABLY CLOSE (READING)
100
This poem compares sunset to the inevitable fall of various empires.
What is "You, Andrew Marvell?"
100
The narrator of Eugene Onegin translates Tatyana's letter into Russian from this language, commonly spoken by nineteenth-century Russian aristocrats.
What is French?
100
This film ends with the reading of an effusively thankful note from two parents whose daughter the protagonist has rescued from a life of prostitution.
What is Taxi Driver?
100
Anthony Hecht summarizes the dark view of this earlier poem in a comic way, writing, "Things are bad / All over etc. etc."
What is "Dover Beach?"
100
Auden describes this writer getting uncomfortably close to his readers after his death, as "the words of a dead man / are modified in the guts of the living."
Who is W. B. Yeats?
200
Disillusioned with modern life, a speaker of Yeats's dreams of traveling to this fallen empire.
What is Byzantium?
200
In Ancient Greek, the name of this labyrinth builder translates as "clever worker."
Who is Daedalus?
200
A vision of this animal appears to both Oscar and his mother in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
What is a mongoose?
200
During his stay at the inn, Don Quixote refuses to remove this garment, resulting in a comic dinner scene.
What is his helmet?
200
In All About My Mother, a performance of this play prompts Manuela to reflect sadly on her unresolved relationship with her ex-husband, whom she met while acting in an amateur production of the same play.
What is A Streetcar Named Desire?
300
According to Dominican folklore, the European invasion and colonization of the New World produced this ancestral curse.
What is the fukú?
300
This author, referenced often in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, wrote a multi-volume French novel whose title has two English translations.
Who is Proust?
300
In All About My Mother, three figures in Manuela's life--her ex-husband, her son, and her adopted son--all share this Spanish name.
What is Esteban?
300
This novel's protagonist has forgone feelings and instead thinks of "or-gates and of and-gates, / Of ROMs, of nor-gates, and of nand-gates."
What is Golden Gate?
300
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior's Dominican accented pronunciation of this famous Irish writer's name gives Oscar the nickname Wao.
Who is Oscar Wilde?
400
In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," Joan Didion derisively describes this county in California's Inland Empire as a provincial place "where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew...where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book."
What is San Bernardino County?
400
The narrator of Don Quixote is able to continue the story thanks to a manuscript in this language, which he buys at the marketplace and pays a passerby to translate.
What is Arabic?
400
In Mulholland Drive, director Adam Kesher's mother appears in Diane's dream as this eccentric but friendly building manager.
Who is Coco?
400
The narrator of Eugene Onegin complains that in all of Russia there are scarcely three good pairs of these.
What are women's feet?
400
In Fun Home, Alison notices a strange correspondence between her father's final letter to her and the work of this Irish novelist—the author of her father's favorite book.
Who is James Joyce?
500
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Yunior compares this dictator to Sauron and Darth Vader, among other pop culture villains.
Who is Rafael Leónidas Trujillo?
500
The MC at Club Silencio repeats these two foreign-language phrases, one in Spanish and one in French.
What are "no hay banda" and "il n'y a pas d'orquestre?"
500
This character, lamenting her infatuation with a certain young man, writes that if she'd never met him she might have become "a faithful wife and mother, / Contented with the life [she] led."
Who is Tatyana?
500
Bruce Bechdel collects objects with this shape, which he liked so much in life that his family chooses to mark his grave with it.
What is an obelisk?
500
In Borges's "Pierre Menard," the narrator's obsession with the title figure leads him to notice the resemblance of Menard's work not only to Cervantes's, but also to the work of this esteemed author.
Who is Shakespeare?
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