In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank
whom the emperor loved more than any of the others. The
grand ladies with high ambitions thought her a presumptuous
upstart, and lesser ladies were still more resentful. Everything
she did offended someone. Probably aware of what was happening,
she fell seriously ill and came to spend more time at home than
at court. It may have been because of a bond in a former life that she
bore the emperor a beautiful son, a jewel beyond compare. The
emperor was in a fever of impatience to see the child on the
earliest day possible. When he was brought to the court, the
paulownia was full in bloom in the garden. The emperor's eldest
son was the grandson of the Minister of the Right. The world
assumed that with this powerful support he would one day be
named crown prince; but the new child was far more beautiful.One of my favorite openings:
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. At that time, Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on
the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like
prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was
necessary to point.
forwardslash I see this formatting bug every great once in a while -- why's it only happen sometimes?
According to the markup help, "Text after a blank line that is indented by two or more spaces is reproduced verbatim." You can add your own line breaks if the text is long. fireballs619, if you do this, could you also please correct the phrase "as he faced the firing squad"? This is probably my favorite opening too. My Spanish is not good enough to get through the novel, but I enjoy looking at the original. The "river of clear water" is "un río de aguas diáfanas." García Márquez paid high praise to Gregory Rabassa's English version:
Another memorable firing squad scene appears in the Jorge Luis Borges story "The Secret Miracle," here translated by Anthony Bonner: five-page PDF version I was charmed to see Borges sneak a reference to his character Hladik in the footnote to another story.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. Macondo era entonces una aldea de 20 casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo.
Mr. García Márquez has said that Mr. Rabassa read One Hundred Years of Solitude, sat down and then rewrote it in English. (He also said that Mr. Rabassa's translation improved on the original.)
On the night of March 14, 1939, in an apartment on the Zelternergasse in Prague, Jaromir Hladik, author of the unfinished tragedy The Enemies, of a Vindication of Eternity, and of an inquiry into the indirect Jewish sources of Jakob Boehme, dreamt a long drawn out chess game.
I really enjoyed reading the Rabassa translation, but there were a few subtle things in the Spanish version that I loved. For example, I feel that the sense of 'conocer' gets lost in the translation of that first line. Rabassa chooses to translate it as 'discover', which is all well and good, but to me it conveys the sense of ' conquering' or 'coming to master' in some sense. In Spanish the verb is really 'to get to know', and I think it makes that line much more personal. Just little things like that.