NOBEL Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Living to Tell the Tale" which hit local bookstores recently is a good read. Written like a work of fiction, it starts when the writer, the eldest of 11 siblings, was born on March 6, 1927 and ends when his wife Mercedes, accepts his proposal in the 1950s.
The 538-page book, the first of a projected three-volume memoir - focuses heavily on Garcia Marquez's family, schooling and early career as a journalist and short story writer, It includes references to numerous real-life events that ended up in his novels in one form or another, including the banana-company massacre that appears prominently in "One Hundred Years of Solitude: and the friend whose life and death were the model for "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." The first volume shows a mind prodigiously endowed as far as recollection is concerned despite the fact that the events happened many years earlier.
Garcia Marquez can recall even the most insignificant details of his past. One example is when his mother, Luisa Marquez Santiago, was looking for him in Barranquilla to ask him to accompany her to Aracataca to sell the house of her parents. Told that she could find her son at Libreria Mundo or in nearby cafes she sought him out and Garcia Marquez can remember in vivid details how the meeting with his mother went. He writes , "Something in her had changed and this kept me from recognizing her at first glance. She was forty-five. Adding up her eleven births, she had spent almost ten years pregnant and at least another ten nursing her children..." On his prodigious memory, here's what the Aniston Star says, "Reading 'Living to Tell the Tale', one feels shipwrecked in the deep ocean of Garcia Marquez's memory...The most notable and incredible characteristic of his work is the profound nature of his memory and the rich detail with which he recapitulates." His works - twelve novels, six collections of short stories, and three non-fiction books - have placed him alongside the world's best and famous writers, including those who influenced him-G. K.
Chesterton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, Gunter Grass, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Juan Rolfo, and Sophocles. He has, in turn, influenced other writers, such as Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Will Self, and T. Coraghessan Boyle.
His enormous output catapulted him to the top in 1982, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He has gained financial success and has houses in Mexico City, Cartagena, Cuernavaca, Paris, Barcelona, Barranquilla and Havana.
By the 1990s, he had eased into a lifestyle of writing, teaching, and political activism. He had also struck up friendships with powerful and prominent leaders such as the late French President Francois Mitterrand, Gen. Omar Torrijos who seized power in Panama in 1969, and Cuba's Fidel Castro who had given Garcia Marquez a house in Havana. That he knows Castro has helped a great deal in his involvement in peace negotiations. He has referred to himself as the "last optimist in Colombia." He introduced former Colombian President Andre Pastrana to Castro who facilitated peace meetings with guerrillas.
Garcia Marquez also helped restore good relations between Washington and Bogota.
The first volume of "Living to Tell the Tale" has won critical acclaim, although one cannot help but wonder about the real quality of its language. The book of course was written originally in Spanish and translated into English by Dr. Edith Grossman.
The reader is reassured, however, by the fact that Grossman is an award-winning translator, specializing in English versions of Spanish-language books.
She is one of the most important translators of Latin American fiction in the last century, translating Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and the works of Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Jaime Manrique, Julian Rios and Alvaro Muntis.
In a speech delivered at the PEN Tribute to Garcia Marquez held in New York City on November 3, 2003, Grossman explained her method: "Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation.
Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."
