Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
This is the opening line to the late Columbian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. This novel was first published in Argentina in 1967 under the title Cien Anos de Soledad. My copy is translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. It has been noted that to find the soul of a novel written by a great author you should read it in the author’s native language. Rabassa gets high marks for his ability to translate Marquez’s text and not lose too much of the poetic and lyrical style going from Spanish to English. Here, I extrapolate a few words and phrases as examples of Gregory Rabassa’s talent in finding the English parallel introducing me, the reader, to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s genius of spinning a tale. An example found on page 3, the abnegation of a scientist, page 10, soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head and torso of a woman, page 55, drew him out of his chimerical world, page 65, soporific air, and page 112, by the curlews. (I am annotating the preceding examples from the HarperPerennial ModernClassics paperback edition.) As I write this, I am almost two-thirds through the novel.
I loved Latin and French when first introduced to me during 7th grade. I was blessed to have the same Latin and French teachers through my senior year of high school. As students we were called upon to translate a few pages of Cicero’s Latin prose into our pubescent English as well as Victor Hugo’s French prose into our fractured English. Learning another language and translating it to your native language at a time in your life when English is so new it too might as well be regarded as a foreign language; well, for me, that often was a lesson in futility. Take a moment and look up what Gregory Rabassa accomplished with the literary arts and language. Very impressive.
One Hundred Years of Solitude has been labeled a novel with the attributes of magical realism. In the first half of this remarkable story, I have come across scenes of talking ghosts, flying carpets, ice first thought as a large diamond, a mythical town of Macondo, an extraordinary family tree where the founding matriarch is still alive and active as she reaches a hundred years of age. Many generations named after her late husband Jose and one of their sons, Aurelianos. The only name not handed down so far is the matriarch’s name, Ursula. William Kennedy in his New York Times Book Review states; Mr. Garcia Marquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life. After reading 197 pages of Marquez’s novel before me, I can certainly agree with Mr. Kennedy’s assessment.
I introduced you to One Hundred Years of Solitude by sharing the first line of the novel. Zusak’s novel The Book Thief , I read in December, has a memorable last line. Rest assured it wont spoil the story if you haven’t read it yet and you plan to read it. Remember Death is the narrator of The Book Thief.
A LAST NOTE FROM YOUR NARRATOR**********
I am haunted by humans.
Many great novels can be identified by their first line or sentences. Here are a few that have lodged in my reading memory.
- Call me Ishmael. Melville’s Moby Dick.
- Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
- It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
- It was the best of times, it was the worst of times-A few words opening Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities.
- The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. Crane’s opening line to The Red Badge of Courage.
I add to the list the first line of this novel at the risk of being repetitive.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
As I reflect at the end of the first month of a new year and at the end of the first weeks of a new/old President, I notice that the waves are a little higher and the wind a little sharper. My metaphorical lighthouse has sharpened its light! In many great novels, the first written lines open the world of possibilities in the stories about to unfold to the reader. I pray that this new year is not a repeat of years past when a few lived well at the expense of the many. That story is as old as time. The tide is changing and I hope it translates to laissez les bons temps rouler! Or in my not too young English translation, let the good times roll!
Thank you for reading.
Be in peace and joy!
Mark