Cien años de soledad

It's time I stop remembering Spanish and instead start reading Don Quixote in its golden Castilian glyph. To that end, I've contracted a perilous apprenticeship: before I windmill my way through that senile knight's superego, I will unlearn everything I know about the Goodday family and their damned ice; no, there will be no great inventions. Let the pirate be a pirata; his guise will make all the difference.


This is a difficult book to read. In English the syntax looks tame and limpid, and it is. But when you know only about a thousand words, and most of those concern directions to and from hospitals or airports, and when you have a strenuous command of the grammar but a vacillating interest in real speech, a single moderately subordinated clause can overtask you. The prose moves liquidly, and in no great hurry, and while that fluid touch makes for marvelous storytelling when the language is more of a vehicle than a medium, when the words and sentences do not function as they should--when they stubbornly present themselves as text--all that delicacy and ease coils about you, wrapping you up, strangling you.


Still, that first sentence is a gift:


"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."


Ice? What the fuck?? Dull would he be of soul who can read that sentence and not feel electrified by the weird juxtaposition of "in front of the firing squad" and "come to know the ice"--that is bewildering, fiery stuff. And what time are we talking about? "Many years later" he "would remember" something else that happened at some other time? Fucked up deixis, that, and fascinating. In fact, if we could summon him to this parochial little post, Carl "Oh God!" Brutananadilewski would tell us that Márquez lights his fuse, and Carl is never wrong. He doesn't even need any instructions--to know how to rock.


But do you want to know about the unexpected letdown? After struggling through the first few pages today, glossing words and phrases and circling grammatical oddities that I'd like to return to later, I suddenly realized that the passage isn't really any better in Spanish. I mean, it's not worse, either. Here and there nuances surface, but none carries any significance beyond the usual curiosity and bland ubiquity of linguistic difference. The final effect is like translating English into English: all that work to transform the dense and dangerous uncertainty of one language into the pellucid surety of another succeeds only when it recreates the very obscurity and difficulty with which you began your labor. Retarded.


We may have overestimated the value of untranslated literature. Poetry is a gay, forbidding mystery and is therefore subject to weird forces of form and meaning, powers which, by their very nature, frustrate any effort to render universal what is singular or obedient what is fractious. With poems, language matters. With prose? Eh. Maybe when it approaches poetry or, if I may stammer my Jakobsonian cant, engages the poetic function. Otherwise, the devices of prose seem to me exchangeable among languages. Perhaps they are more conceptual than linguistic; their architecture merely manifests itself in and through language. It is a far different matter when language itself is the architecture. (And no, language and thought are not interchangeable strata; each has its particular grade and quality, and though they often coincide, their coincidence does not make them identical. And also, no, the material cause does not make a formal cause. Stupid Barthes.)

This was a pretentious post. I apologize. Summary: 1. I'm reading a book 2. The book is hard to read 3. It's more or less the same book in Spanish that it is in English 4. So why am I reading it in Spanish? 5. And when do I get to read about Dulcinea del Toboso, that fictitious strumpet? Always demanding honor, and, um, clothes.