Garcia Marquez and translation
john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Tue, 27 Jan 1998 11:20:34 -0500
Hello.
Just a brief note on a recent topic:
For reasons of personal history not necessary and too long to explain here,
I can tell you that Garcia Marquez has always worked quite closely with his
English translators (first Gregory Rabassa and then Edith Grossman). The
translations are almost always joint creative projects (there have been a
couple of recent exceptions) and some of the English versions have been, in
a certain way, nearly as "written" by GM as are the Spanish versions.
Of course this does not change the fact, for me, that translations are on
one level, quite simply, different books that carry different signatures
and, though they share much with their originals their autonomy should also
be respected and they should be treated as separate texts.
By the way, just for the sake of trivial gossip, I should also mention that
Garcia Marquez has said a couple of times, apparently seriously, that he
actually prefers the English version of *One Hundred Years...* to the
Spanish version. This is not the case, however with several of his other
novels.
One last question: I've read three different translations of *Crime and
Punishment* over the years, including, most recently, an oversize edition
of a translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky that I found
strange but engaging. I know no Russian of course and was wondering what
others thought of the various *Crime...* translations.
Also, for a wonderfully strong and performative translation, check out
Carlos Fuentes' translation of *Don Quixote*. It's a lot of fun besides.
OB Salinger: Since GM's name has come up, here's a question: are there
certain works of Salinger's (some of the short stories perhaps or even a
Glass novel or two) that might be called "magic-realism"? There is
certainly the reliance on significant detail and although there might not
be the excesses of descriptive language, there are moments of the
extraordinary described in the matter-of-fact tone that GM so often uses
for his most wondrous events (the ascension of Remedios for instance, or
the Marines taking away the sea in *Autumn of the Patriarch*).
Just wondering.
Yours in his mother tongue,
--John