This is my translation of 
This blog consists mainly of my English translations of Gabriel García Márquez's 2004 novella Memoria de mis putas tristes, posted one section at a time — although if I encounter any especially interesting issues in the translating process, I will write about those too. What I'm hoping is that people looking for an English translation of this book will stumble across this site and feel compelled to offer their commentary about my decisions to translate a certain phrase or word as I did. I'd love for it to become an interactive kind of thing.
If you know some Spanish and want to follow this play-by-play, MDMPT is available in a U.S. Spanish-language paperback from just about any decent library or bookstore, or from Amazon. I also recently ran across another blog whose author is posting the original Spanish version chapter by chapter, so you can read it there until it gets shut down for violating copyright law.
A few about the translator (me, Carl Burnett) and his motivations: I am not a native speaker of Spanish; in fact, my command of the language leaves something to be desired. Nonetheless, I have found that I enjoy translation, and that translating Spanish-language literature with the help of a good dictionary helps me understand it better and appreciate it more. Therefore, I made the conscious decision not to actually read MDMPT in its entirety before beginning my translation; in fact, I am often reading only a few pages ahead of what I've translated.
Why did I choose this particular book? Well, in the summer of 2002 I took a literature class at Dartmouth on García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). As many people have, I fell in love with the novel, even as I struggled to read it in the original Spanish and sometimes had to resort to an English translation, which didn't always seem to capture the nuances my professor pointed out in the text. It was during another Dartmouth class the following winter, "Translation: Theory and Practice," that I first entertained the idea of doing my own García Márquez translation. When MDMPT was released last summer, I bought a copy and resolved to follow through with my idea, since the book (Gabo's first new work of fiction in years) was a manageable 112 pages and will not be released in an English translation until the fall of 2005, or so I've gathered. I began this translation last spring while visiting a friend in Washington, D.C.; the first few pages were written in the Library of Congress' beautiful Main Reading Room. I put it aside for a few months and resumed working on my translation in June at my parents' house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine; since then I have put in time working on this thing in a number of places, such as on Peaks Island, Maine and in the library at George Washington University in D.C., the Forest Park (Ill.) Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library.
Finally, two disclaimers:
If you know some Spanish and want to follow this play-by-play, MDMPT is available in a U.S. Spanish-language paperback from just about any decent library or bookstore, or from Amazon. I also recently ran across another blog whose author is posting the original Spanish version chapter by chapter, so you can read it there until it gets shut down for violating copyright law.
A few about the translator (me, Carl Burnett) and his motivations: I am not a native speaker of Spanish; in fact, my command of the language leaves something to be desired. Nonetheless, I have found that I enjoy translation, and that translating Spanish-language literature with the help of a good dictionary helps me understand it better and appreciate it more. Therefore, I made the conscious decision not to actually read MDMPT in its entirety before beginning my translation; in fact, I am often reading only a few pages ahead of what I've translated.
Why did I choose this particular book? Well, in the summer of 2002 I took a literature class at Dartmouth on García Márquez's Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). As many people have, I fell in love with the novel, even as I struggled to read it in the original Spanish and sometimes had to resort to an English translation, which didn't always seem to capture the nuances my professor pointed out in the text. It was during another Dartmouth class the following winter, "Translation: Theory and Practice," that I first entertained the idea of doing my own García Márquez translation. When MDMPT was released last summer, I bought a copy and resolved to follow through with my idea, since the book (Gabo's first new work of fiction in years) was a manageable 112 pages and will not be released in an English translation until the fall of 2005, or so I've gathered. I began this translation last spring while visiting a friend in Washington, D.C.; the first few pages were written in the Library of Congress' beautiful Main Reading Room. I put it aside for a few months and resumed working on my translation in June at my parents' house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine; since then I have put in time working on this thing in a number of places, such as on Peaks Island, Maine and in the library at George Washington University in D.C., the Forest Park (Ill.) Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library.
Finally, two disclaimers:
- I don't claim to own the copyright to reproduce Gabriel García Márquez's book here. This translation is my own; the story itself is entirely his own.
- As you might realize from the title, Memoria de mis putas tristes is an adult work of fiction that contains very little foul language but some pretty outlandish sex scenes; so will my translation. Be forewarned.
posted by Unknown | 8:04 PM
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