
Gabriel García Márquez’s Archive Freely Available Online - sohkamyung
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/11/arts/gabriel-garcia-marquez-archive-online.html
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spodek
Two of the greatest opening lines to books:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was
to remember that distant day when his father took him to discover ice.” – One
Hundred Years of Solitude

“It was inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal
Urbino of the fate of unrequited love.” – Love in the Time of Cholera

Each is almost a story in itself, a pleasure to read, and an even greater
pleasure to unpack and understand.

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forinti
It's worth it to learn Spanish just to read his books.

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osense
I have been wondering about this — how much more enjoyable is it to read a
book in it's original language, as opposed to just reading someone's
translation? Or is it just the thought that you're able to read the original,
as author intended — possibly after spending time to learn a language just to
be able to do this — that makes it count?

~~~
lmkg
A currently-popular literary theory (strongly espoused by Jorge Luis Borges,
whose translation of Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ was highly influential to
Marques) is that the translation of a literary work is, in fact, a brand new
literary work authored by the translator. The fact that languages don't line
up one-to-one, and the fact that language (and literature) is deeply entwined
with culture, means that the translator has to make a lot of creative
decisions when translating, and that the final product can never be a
'perfect' reproduction of the original text.

It's not necessarily about enjoyment, as it is about reading what the author
wrote as opposed to what the translator wrote. But this also means that
sometimes, the translated work is a good work in its own right and worth
reading (Borges once said "The original is not faithful to the translation").
So, it really depends on a lot of things. But for Marques in particular, his
works are very tied to Spanish culture so even as an outsider, learning
Spanish and reading the originals still isn't quite the same as reading them
as a Spaniard.

~~~
mbauman
If you're interested in translation, you may want to check out _Why
Translation Matters_ by Grossman, who translated _Love in the Time of Cholera_
among other things. I hadn't thought of translation as anything other than
utilitarian and found Grossman's book enlightening.
[https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171303/why-
translatio...](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171303/why-translation-
matters)

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nightbrawler
Interesting! He was last night's final Jeopardy:

In a 1967 novel this Nobel Prize winner wrote, “The secret of a good old age
is simply an honorable pact with solitude”

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vonnik
The irony here is how jealously Garcia Marquez guarded his private life, only
to have it posted online in its entirety. When he learned that one of his
friends had sold their correspondence to an American university (much like
UT), he stopped writing to his friends altogether, and started calling them on
the phone. For more background, his long interview, "The Fragrance of Guava",
is a great read.

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schemathings
So why do I have to go to a paywalled site to read about free online content?
OP and NYT can both take a damn hike.

~~~
sohkamyung
It reads fine for me (but I'm using NoScript and Adblockers). You can access
the Gabriel García Márquez archive at [1]

[1]
[https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...](https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll51/)

