Andrea Labinger As a young girl growing up in New York City, Andrea Labinger spent a great amount of time visiting her grandparents’ store in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. “They didn’t speak Spanish, but I was exposed to that sort of atmosphere from an early age,” she says. Her grandparents lived in an apartment building near the store. Because there was no air conditioning in the building, doors were left open in the summer. Labinger remembers hearing merengue music blasting and the smell of the food their neighbors were making as well as the sound of conversations. “I heard them speaking Spanish and thought how much cooler that was than anything I had ever heard before,” she says. In seventh grade she had the opportunity to take her first Spanish class. She still remembers her first Spanish book. It had a red cover and was titled Fronteras, she says. “I can see it.” Because the book used a lot of cognates and contained sentences like “El elefante es un animal” and “La banana es una fruta,” Labinger thought to herself, “Ooh, I understand Spanish.” “It was probably not a good book, but it was mine, and I could understand it,” Labinger says. “When you’re good at something, you tend to pursue it. So I never stopped.” While in college, she didn’t have the money to study abroad. “The only traveling I did was by subway,” she says. But she has since had many opportunities to do so. “I’m making up for travel I didn’t do when I was in college,” says Labinger, who has been to Latin America, Europe and Asia, to name a few places. “I haven’t been to Africa,; that’s one the only continent I haven’t been to.” This would come as a surprise to anyone who has ever been in Labinger’s office and has seen the wide variety of giraffes, her favorite animal. “They’re beautiful and unusual animals,” Labinger says, admiring their strength. “They’re unmistakable and immediately recognizable.” Plus, she says, they are not only beautiful and tall, but silent, something she claims she is not. Labinger says finding new and different giraffes for her collection is a challenge “Believe it or not, you can get a lot of giraffes from Mexico,” she says. “Don’t ask me why.” What Labinger enjoys most about traveling is absorbing the culture. She not only enjoys the monuments, but enjoys simply walking down the streets and seeing how people live. She says she’ll often sit in a café and, if she can understand the language, she’ll eavesdrop. She will try to do the same in markets and on trains. “I try to figure out how they live and what life would be like there,” she says. She also revels in the holidays, celebrations, dancing, music, and of course the food because she’s “a big food freak.” “Aside from our differences – that’s what makes us interesting – we go through our lives looking for little bits of happiness,” she says. “If we could understand that, the world could be better. All human beings all strive for a better life; we just go about it in different ways. But the goal is the same.” On a trip to Mexico, Labinger found a novel that she was so fascinated with she brought it home and taught it in her classes. “I thought it was too bad people who don’t speak Spanish couldn’t appreciate it,” she says. So she contacted the author through a friend in Mexico and was given permission to translate the book. Her first translation was published in 1998. She has since translated about 10 books from Spanish to English and has “a few sitting in a drawer waiting for publishers.” A member of the American Literary Translators Association, she translates everything from short stories to novels. After all, reading is one of her favorite hobbies, although she says, “I’m not sure if that’s a hobby or what you do, like breathing.” Summers and sabbaticals have proved to be good opportunities to work on translations, but “just when you’re getting into something, it’s time to go back,” she says. Between teaching and running the Honors House at the University, she finds herself pretty busy. Labinger says she is a demanding professor, but funny at the same time. “Unless they’re laughing at me,” she jokes. “I can never really be sure.” She tries to keep the atmosphere in the classroom light and mix up activities so she doesn’t get bored. Because she is into “sensorial stuff,” she used to bring an electric fry pan to class and cook for some of her lessons. “It’s more fun to do activities like that,” she says. RETURN TO FACULTY LISTmailto:labinger@ulv.edu?subject=HELLOHome.htmlshapeimage_1_link_1
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