by Ilan Stavans
García Márquez’s first work to appear in English was No One Writes to the Colonel in 1968, which included “Big Mama’s Funeral.” For the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Julio Cortázar recommended Gregory Rabassa to García Márquez. But Rabassa was busy working on Guatemalan Nobel Prize laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias’s “banana trilogy” for Delacorte: Mulata (in Spanish Mulata de tal, written in 1963, translated in 1967), Strong Wind (Viento fuerte, 1950, English 1969) and The Green Pope (El papa verde, 1954, English 1971). Cortázar, whose novel Hopscotch had been translated by Rabassa in 1966 for Pantheon and for which Rabassa received the National Book Award, advised García Márquez to wait. As a general rule, Rabassa did not read a novel before he translated it, to allow the thrill of discovery to inspire his work. One Hundred Years of Solitude was an exception. “People who had read the novel in Spanish were talking about it intelligently, sometimes not so intelligently, but always with a kind of awe. I suppose that this should have scared me off, but in manners of translation and a few other things I don’t frighten easily and I was ready to take it on.”19
In the article “Los pobres traductores buenos” (Poor Good Translators) syndicated in 1982, García Márquez discussed the art of translation. He began by invoking the Italian maxim: Traduttore, traditore. He explained that when one reads an author one likes in a language that isn’t the reader’s native tongue, one experiences the urge to translate. “It’s explainable,” he argues, “because one of the pleasures of reading—as is the case of music—is the need to share it with friends.” García Márquez said he understood Marcel Proust’s desire to translate into French a writer who was very different from him: English–speaking John Ruskin. He claimed he would have liked to translate two French writers, André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “both of whom, by the way, don’t enjoy a high estimation by their contemporaries in France.” But he never went beyond the sheer desire.
García Márquez confessed to translating, slowly, the Cantos by Giacomo Leopardi, “but I do it in hiding, away from others and in my very few free hours, with complete awareness that this will not be a road to glory for either me or Leopardi. I do it as one of those bathroom pastimes Jesuit priests describe as solitary pleasures. For now the attempt has been sufficient to make me realize how difficult, and how consuming, it is to fight for the same bread with professional translators.” Toward the end of the article, García Márquez discussed the various translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the languages he was able to understand. “I don’t recognize myself in any of them, only in Spanish.”
But he celebrated Gregory Rabassa. He once called him “the best Latin American writer in the English language.” Of Rabassa, García Márquez said: “I’ve read some of the books translated into English [by him] and I must recognize that I found some passages that I liked more than in the original. The impression one gets of Rabassa’s translations is that he memorized the book in Spanish and then writes it in its entirety in English: his fidelity is more complex than simple literality. He never includes a footnoted explanation, which is the less valid and most frequented strategy of bad translators. In this sense, the most notable example is of the Brazilian translator of one of my books, who gave a footnoted explanation to the word astromelia: imaginary flower invented by García Márquez. The worse thing is that later on I forget that astromelias not only exist, as everyone knows in the Caribbean, but that their name is Portuguese.”20
The story of Rabassa’s masterful rendition begins with Cass Canfield Jr. at Harper & Row in New York, the son of Cass Canfield, one of the company’s founders. As a young acquisition editor, Canfield Jr. was interested in Latin American writers. There was buzz in the American publishing industry about the new crop from Latin America. A long-time professor at the City University of New York, Rabassa made the mistake of accepting from Cass Canfield Jr. a work for hire agreement for his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude.21 It’s “quite heartening for me as a lover of good literature” to see the success of the novel, which has gone through endless reprints, but it’s “saddening to me as a translator.”
Rabassa’s contract wasn’t unique. It was common for translators to be paid a flat fee and not receive royalties, unless it was for a translation of the Greek classics. Nowadays, many translators have royalties written into their contracts. In retrospect, Rabassa considered it akin to “spreading manure on a suburban lawn.”22 Canfield fought to get Rabassa royalties for the first paperback, but that dried up rather quickly for concrete reasons: Harper & Row had a long-standing contract with Carmen Barcells Literary Agency to publish García Márquez on a regular basis. But after García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the agency, according to Canfield, wanted to amend the old contracts, which is not an accepted practice in the industry.
Although García Márquez was a best-selling author, Canfield and others at Harper & Row were adamant against the change. They offered a higher bid for García Márquez’s most recent novel, The General in His Labyrinth, translated not by Rabassa but by Edith Grossman. The page proofs had already been produced when Carmen Balcells decided to move her author to another New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. García Márquez’s previous books remained with Harper & Row, but the complication prevented royalties from being paid.23 “There is something on occasion from the Book-of-the-Month Club,” Rabassa has said, “but in general, as far as I’m concerned, the book might just as well be in the public domain . . . Let me stop whining, though. It’s too prevalent among translators as, like so many famished locusts, they pounce hungrily on the hors d’oeuvres at literary affairs. We must take what small comfort we can doing something honorable in a world of imposters, pretenders, and bourgeois tradesmen, as old Prince François so aptly put it in The Fallen Sparrow.”
Rabassa’s first challenge was the title. “A simple declarative title Cien años de soledad should offer no trouble whatever,” he argued later in his book If This Be Treason.24 “Think again. We can pass de and años, they stand up fine, even though años would have to go if we opted for century, because that’s what a hundred years comprise. I turned that option down rather quickly. Cien is our first problem because in Spanish it bears no article so that the word can waver between one hundred and a hundred. There is no hint in the title as to which it should be in English . . . I viewed the extent of time involved as something quite specific, as in a prophecy, something definite, a countdown, not just any old hundred years. What is troublesome, of course, is that both interpretations are conjoined subconsciously for the reader of the Spanish . . . But an English speaker reading the Spanish will have to decide subconsciously which meaning is there. They cannot be melded in his mind. I was convinced and I still am that Gabo meant in the sense of one as this meaning is closer to the feel of the novel. Also, there was no cavil on his part over the title in English.”25
Rabassa took great care with the names in the novel. “In order to avoid confusion between father and son (although confusion is subtly encouraged throughout the book) I had to make sure that the old patriarch was always José Arcadio Buendía, never any truncated version, much the way that Charlie Brown is never called anything but Charlie Brown in Peanuts. There is some kind of personal essence that must be preserved as we handle names and as the novel progresses this essence becomes clear and the names go on unchanged and exude this essence while taking on new accretion. When I was growing up the president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as he always put it, or Franklin D. Roosevelt, not to mention FDR. It rubs against a nerve today when I hear him called simply Franklin Roosevelt. Part of his essence has been left out, making him akin to Franklin Pierce, God save us! What if we went about speaking of John Whittier, Henry Longfellow, Oliver Holmes? Gabo had wise reasons for keeping the name José Arcadio Buendía intact, singling him out in distinction from his son, who was simply José Arcadio, with no surname ever mentioned, and from his great-grandson José Arcadio Segundo. In this last case I chose t
o keep the Spanish word for second, it being understood as a cognate, thinking that José Arcadio II or José Arcadio the Second sounded too royal or too highfalutin.”26
The question of how to translate the first line of the novel made Rabassa think. “Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.” Rabassa claimed, “People go on repeating this all the time (in English) and I can only hope that I have got them saying what it means. I wrote: ‘many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ There are variant possibilities. In the British army it would have been a ‘firing party,’ which I rather like, but I was writing for American readers. Había de could have been would (How much wood can a woodchuck chuck?), but I think was to has a better feel to it. I chose remember over recall because I feel that it conveys a deeper memory. Remote might have aroused thoughts of such inappropriate things as remote control and robots. Also, I liked distant when used with time. I think Dr. Einstein would have approved. The real problem for choice was with conocer and I have come to know that my selection has set a great many Professor Horrendo all aflutter. It got to the point that my wife Clem had to defend my choice (hers too) against one such worthy in a seminar in which she was participating. The word seen straight means to know a person or thing for the first time, to meet someone, to be familiar with something. What is happening here is a first-time meeting, or learning. It can also mean to know something more deeply than saber, to know from experience. García Márquez has used the Spanish word here with all its connotations. But to know ice just won’t do in English. It implies, ‘How do you do, ice?’ It could be ‘to experience ice.’ The first is foolish, the second is silly. When you get to know something for the first time, you’ve discovered it. Only after that can you come to know it in the full sense. I could have said ‘to make the acquaintance with ice,’ but that, too, sounds nutty, with its implication of tipping one’s hat or giving a handshake. I stand by what I put down in this important opening sentence.”27
García Márquez wasn’t fluent enough in English to be of useful help to Rabassa when choosing variants. Rabassa communicated with him a number of times, by mail, to ask about the flora and fauna of the Caribbean and of Colombia in particular, and for other precise matters.28 The first edition published by Editorial Sudamericana didn’t contain a family tree. It was García Márquez’s intention to allow the reader to experience some confusion about the characters, as well as time and place. Rabassa claims that the editors at Harper & Row asked him to create a family tree for the English translation. “At the time I thought it was a good idea, something to help readers keep all the characters straight and to let them see the complex interrelationships. Later on, after the book had come out, I had second thoughts. If García Márquez had wanted such a table he would have put one in the first Spanish edition.”
Rabassa speculated that the fusion and confusion were meant to be part of the novel, revealing how all members of our species must look to apes or horses, which may have trouble distinguishing among us. “This idea also ties in with the repetition of Christian names in the family, so that distinction is of little import after six or seven generations and a hundred years, when memory dissolves and all who went before become what Turgenev called ‘gray people.’ It’s puzzling, or is it, since it was put together by academics, that the fine footnoted Spanish edition in the Cátedra series also carries a genealogical table at the beginning.”29
There was enormous buzz in New York about García Márquez’s novel. Arguably the most important review of One Hundred Years of Solitude in English was by John Leonard in the March 3, 1970, issue of the New York Times daily. Leonard started by saying that the reader emerges “from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire.” He continued: “A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turn angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not only the story of the Buendía family and the Colombian town of Macondo. It is a recapitulation of our evolutionary and intellectual experience. Macondo is Latin America in microcosm: local autonomy yielding to state authority; anticlericalism; party politics; the coming of the United Fruit Company; aborted revolutions; the rape of innocence by history. And the Buendías (inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics) seem doomed to ride a biological tri-cycle in circles from solitude to magic to poetry to science to politics to violence back again to solitude.”
Leonard placed García Márquez’s achievement in the context of world literature. “Family chronicle, then, and political tour de force, and metaphysical speculation, and, intentionally, a cathedral of words, perceptions and legends that amounts to the declaration of a state of mind: solitude being one’s admission of one’s own mortality and one’s discovery that that terrible apprehension is itself mortal, dies with you, must be rediscovered and forgotten again, endlessly. With a single bound Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either.” Leonard concluded with a single word: “Dazzling.”30
On March 8, 1970, in the New York Times Book Review, Michael Kiely wrote a flat, unintelligent appraisal. Kiely seemed trapped in an understanding of fantasia based on Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: “To speak of a land of enchantment, even in reference to a contemporary novel, is to conjure up images of elves, moonbeams and slippery mountains. Along with the midgets and fairies, one can expect marvelous feats and moral portents, but not much humor and almost certainly no sex. The idea, it would seem, is to forget the earth. At least that is one idea of enchantment.” But Kiely suggested that this approach is not shared by García Márquez, “who has created in One Hundred Years of Solitude an enchanted place that does everything but coy . . . Macondo oozes, reeks and burns even when it is most tantalizing and entertaining. It is a place flooded with lies and liars and yet it spills over with reality. Lovers in this novel can idealize each other into bodiless spirits, howl with pleasure in their hammocks or, as in one case, smear themselves with peach jam and roll naked on the front porch. The hero can lead a Quixotic expedition across the jungle, but although his goal is never reached, the language describing his quest is pungent with life . . . This is the language of a poet who knows the earth and does not fear it as the enemy of the dreamer.” Kiely concluded, “Stew is too modest an image with which to describe the wit and power of this lusty fantasia, but if the strong savor banishes visions of twinkle toes, it has served a purpose.”31
V. S. Pritchett, in the New Yorker, let his admiration spill forth: “the history of the Buendía family and their women in three or four generations is written as a hearsay report on the growth of the little Colombian town; it comes to life because it is continuously leaping out of fact into the mythical and the myth is comic. One obvious analogy is to Rabelais. It is suggested, for example, that Aureliano Segundo’s sexual orgies with his concubine are so enjoyable that his own livestock catch the fever. Animals and birds are unable to stand by and do nothing.” For Pritchett the story was a social history “but not as it is found in books but as it muddles its way forward and backward among the sins of family life and the accidents of trade.” He thought that One Hundred Years of Solitude denied interpretation. “One could say that a little Arcady was created but was ruined by the ‘Promethean ideas’ that came into the head of its daring founder. Or that little lost towns have their moment—as civilizations do—and are then obliterated.”32
By mid-month, Time magazine ran an anonymous piece that sang the novel’s praises. “Gabriel García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. ‘Nothing interesting has happened to me since,’ he has said. His exp
eriences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a whole individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind . . . Reduced to essence, the exotic Buendías become immediate—yet mythically compelling like Tolstoy’s Rostov family, or the doomed scions of Faulkner’s Sartoris. But One Hundred Years of Solitude is more than a family chronicle. The author is really at work on an imaginative spiritual history of any and all Latin American communities. In the process, he fondly reveals more about the Latin soul than all Oscar Lewis’s selective eavesdroppings does.”33
García Márquez’s reaction to these reviews, according to Cass Canfield Jr., was ecstatic. In time, he learned to temper his response to readers. About criticism, García Márquez stated: “Critics for me are the biggest example of what intellectualism is. First of all, they have a theory of what a writer should be. The try to get the writer to fit their model, and if he doesn’t fit, they still try to get him in by force . . . I really have no interest in what critics think of me; nor have I read criticism in many years. They have claimed for themselves the task of being intermediaries between the author and the reader. I’ve always tried to be a very clear and precise writer, trying to reach the reader directly without having to go through the critic.”34 García Márquez’s dismissal of what critics said about him and his books runs deeper. Not only did he mistrust their instincts but he resented their pretentious philosophizing. Yet his own statements, then and later, distill a sense of false modesty, even pomposity, making him seem arrogant and aloof. It could be, of course, that his success fosters undiminished envy, for which he is penalized.