I’m back in Jishou after 2 months of travel. I’m working on a longer-form essay right now, one that I’ll likely break into a few posts over a few week period. I’ve been reading a lot of smart people’s views on the future, and this essay is meant to couple a synthesis of some of the things they’re saying with my own thoughts on the issues they raise. For now, I want to show you a small side-project I worked on for a few days of my break.
I did a lot of reading over break (three of my favorite books from what I read: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra). As a way of keeping up with my Spanish, I’m working through El amor en los tiempos de cólera, Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez. I haven’t finished it yet, but this passage in particular struck me. It has to do with the decline and death of one of the main characters’ father, and gives a window into his initial stages of mourning. It’s a little melancholy, but beautiful too. I thought I would share my own (amateur and unresearched) translation.
The Spanish:
No vivió su gloria. Cuando reconoció en sí mismo los trastornos irreparables que había visto y compadecido en los otros, no intentó siquiera una batalla inútil, sino que se apartó del mundo para no contaminar a nadie. Encerrado solo en un cuarto de servicio del Hospital de la Misericordia, sordo al llamado de sus colegas y a la súplica de los suyos, ajeno al horror de los pestíferos que agonizaban por los suelos de los corredores desbordados, escribió para la esposa y los hijos una carta de amor febril, de gratitud por haber existido, en la cual se revelaba cuánto y con cuánta avidez había amado la vida. Fue un adiós de veintle pliegos desgarrados en los que se notaban los progresos del mal por el deterioro de la escritura, y no era necesario haber conocido a quien los había escrito para saber que la firma fue puesta con el último aliento. De acuerdo con sus disposiciones, el cuerpo ceniciento se confundió en el cementerio común, y no fue visto por nadie que lo amara.
El doctor Juvenal Urbino recibió el telegrama tres días después en París, durante una cena de amigos, e hizo un brindis con champaña por la memoria de su padre. Dijo: “Era un hombre bueno”. Más tarde había de reprocharse a sí mismo su falta de madurez: eludía la realidad para no llorar. Pero tres semanas después recibió una copia de la carta póstuma, y entonces se rindió a la verdad. De un golpe se le reveló a fondo la imagen del hombre al que había conocido antes que a otro ninguno, que lo había criado e instruido y había dormido y fornicado treinta y dos años con su madre, y sin embargo, nunca antes de esa carta se le había mostrado tal como era en cuerpo y alma, por pura y simple timidez. Hasta entonces, el doctor Juvenal Urbino y su familia habían concebido la muerte como un percance que les ocurría a los otros, a los padres de los otros, a los hermanos y los cónyuges ajenos, pero no a los suyos. Eran gentes de vidas lentas, a las cuales no se les veía volverse viejas, ni enfermarse ni morir, sino que iban desvaneciéndose poco a poco en su tiempo, volviéndose recuerdos, brumas de otra época, hasta que los asimilaba el olvido. La carta póstuma de su padre, más que el telegrama con la mala noticia, lo mandó de bruces contra la certidumbre de la muerte. Y sin embargo, uno de sus recuerdos más antiguos, quizás a los nueve años, a los once años quizás, era en cierto modo una señal prematura de la muerte a través de su padre. Ambos se habían quedado en la oficina de la casa una tarde de lluvias, él dibujando alondras y girasoles con tizas de colores en las baldosas del piso, y su padre leyendo contra el resplandor de la ventana, con el chaleco desabotonado y ligas de caucho en las mangas de la camisa. De pronto interrumpió la lectura para rascarse la espalda con un rascador de mango largo que tenía una manita de plata en el extremo. Como no pudo, le pidió al hijo que lo rascara con sus uñas, y él lo hizo con la rara sensación de no sentir su propio cuerpo al ser rascado. Al final su padre lo miró por encima del hombro con una sonrisa triste.
– Si yo me muero ahora -le dijo- apenas si te acordarás de mí cuando tengas mi edad.
Lo dijo sin ningún motivo visible, y el ángel de la muerte flotó un instante en la penumbra fresca de la oficina, y volvió a salir por la ventana dejando a su paso un reguero de plumas, pero el niño no las vio. Habían pasado más de veinte años desde entonces y Juvenal Urbino iba a tener muy pronto la edad que había tenido su padre aquella tarde. Se sabía idéntico a él, y a la conciencia de serlo se había sumado ahora la conciencia sobrecogedora de ser tan mortal como él.
My (attempt at) Translation: Note: The book has just gotten through explaining the father’s local fame after he helped resolve a cholera epidemic. Both he and his son are doctors.
His moment of glory didn’t last. When he began to see in himself the beginnings of the same irreversible decline that he had seen so many times in others, he left the futile battle unfought, choosing to leave the world so as not to contaminate anyone else. Locking himself in a service room at the Mercy Hospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, far away from the horror of the plague that slowly died in those radiant corridors, he wrote for his wife and children a fevered love letter, filled with gratitude for having existed, in which he revealed how much and with what avarice he had loved life. It was a goodbye of twenty torn pages, in which the slackening of his handwriting revealed the progress of the disease. One didn’t have to have known the man who wrote it to know that it was signed with his dying breath. In accordance with his wishes, the body of the deceased was lost in the public cemetery before it could be seen by anyone who had loved him.
Doctor Juvenal Urbino, the son, received the telegram 3 days later in Paris. during a dinner with his friends. He made a toast in memory of his father, saying: “He was a good man.” Later, he would regret his lack of maturity: he had skirted the reality of the death of his own father to avoid crying. But 3 weeks later he receive a copy of his father’s posthumous letter, and it was then that he surrendered to the truth. In a moment all illusion fell away and the true image of the man was revealed, of the man that he had met before any other, who had slept and fornicated with his mother for 32 years, but who, out of pure, simple timidity, had never before this letter shown who he truly was. Until that moment, Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had seen death as a misfortune that happened only to others, to the father of others, to unknown brothers and spouses, but not to them. There a people of slow lives, who never saw themselves growing old, getting sick or dying, but in their time fading, little by little, turning into memories, shadows of another age, until they passed through memory itself and were absorbed by oblivion. The letter, more than the telegram that first bore the news, made him face the certainty of death. Nevertheless, one of his earliest memories, from when he was perhaps 9 years old, maybe 11, was in a certain way a premature warning of death that came by way of his father. The two of them were spending a rainy afternoon together at home in his office, him drawing larks and sunflowers on the paving stones with colored chalk, and his father reading by the light of the window, sitting with his vest unbuttoned and his shirtsleeves rolled up with rubber bands. He suddenly stopped his reading to scratch his back with a long mango-wood back scratcher that tipped with a little silver hand. Finding that he couldn’t reach, he asked his son to scratch it for him. He did so, experiencing as he did the strange sensation of not feeling his own body upon being scratched. At last, his father looked over his shoulder with a sad smile.
“If I died today,” he said, “You would hardly remember me when you were my age.”
He said it without any apparent motive, and the angel of death hovered an instant in the crisp shadows of the office, before it left through the window leaving a trail of feathers that the child didn’t see. 20 years had passed since that afternoon and Juvenal Urbino would very soon reach the age that his father had been then. He knew himself to be the same, and added now was the looming truth that he was just as mortal.
I’ll do some more writing about language and language learning in the near future. If you enjoyed this bit of Marquez, 100 years of solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are both very good in any language (also: any other Spanish speakers, feedback is welcome. There were parts that I don’t feel quite right about, so let me know if you would phrase anything differently.)
360 by bike 