The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Something similar happens to me with enthusiastic and affectionate people I meet the world over. There’s always someone who was with me in a place where I’ve never been, and who cherishes a fond memory of that encounter. Or who is a very good friend of some member of my family, who they don’t really know, because the other me seems to have as many relatives as I do, although they’re not real either, but rather the doubles of my relatives.

  In Mexico I frequently meet someone who tells me of the Babylonian binges he goes on with my brother Humberto in Acapulco. The last time I saw him he thanked me for the favor I did through him, and I could say nothing but you’re welcome, hombre, don’t mention it, because I’ve never had the heart to confess that I don’t have any brothers called Humberto or any who live in Acapulco.

  Three years ago or so I had just finished lunch at home in Mexico when the doorbell rang, and one of my sons, laughing his head off, said, “Dad, you’re wanted by yourself at the door.” I leapt out of my chair, thinking with an uncontainable excitement, “Finally, here he is.” But it wasn’t the other, but rather the young Mexican architect Gabriel García Márquez, a calm and tidy man, who endures with great stoicism the misfortune of being listed in the telephone directory. He had been kind enough to find out my address to bring me the correspondence that had been accumulating in his office for years.

  A short time ago, someone who was passing through Mexico looked up our number in the phone book, and was told that we were at the hospital, because la señora had just had a baby girl. What more had I ever desired! The fact is that the architect’s wife must have received a splendid bouquet of roses, and very much deserved, as well, to celebrate the arrival of the daughter I’ve dreamed of all my life and never had.

  No. The young architect is not my other me either, but someone much more respectable: a homonym. The other me, conversely, will never find me, because he doesn’t know where I live, or what I’m like, nor could he conceive of how different we are. He’ll go on enjoying his imaginary existence, dazzling and strange, with his own yacht, his private plane, and his imperial palaces where he bathes in champagne with his golden lovers and knocks out his main rivals. He will go on feeding off my legend, richer than anyone could be, young and handsome forever and happy until the last tear, while I continue growing old without remorse in front of my typewriter, far from his delusions and excesses, and going out to find my lifelong friends every night to drink the usual drinks and miss unconsoled the smell of guava. Because the most unfair thing is this: the other is the one who enjoys the fame, but I am the one who gets screwed by living it.

  February 17, 1982, El País, Madrid

  Poor Good Translators

  Someone said that translating is the best way to read. I think it’s also the most difficult, the least appreciated, and the worst paid. Traduttore, traditore, says the tiresome Italian refrain, taking it for granted that whoever translates us betrays us. Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, one of the most intelligent and obliging translators in France, made some kitchen revelations in his memoirs that might lead us to think the opposite. “The translator is the novelist’s ape,” he said, paraphrasing Mauriac, and meaning that the translator should make the same gestures and assume the same postures as the writer, whether she wants to or not. His own French translations of then young and unknown writers from the United States—William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck—are not only magisterial recreations, but also introduced to France a historic generation, whose influence among their European contemporaries—including Sartre and Camus—is more than evident. So Coindreau was not a traitor, but just the opposite: a brilliant accomplice. As all great translators always have been, though their personal contributions to the translated work tend to go unnoticed, while their defects get magnified.

  When you read an author in a language that is not your own you feel an almost natural desire to translate it. This is understandable, because one of the pleasures of reading—like music—is the possibility of sharing it with your friends. Maybe that explains how Marcel Proust died without fulfilling one of his recurring desires, which was to translate into French someone as different from himself as John Ruskin. Two of the writers I would have liked to translate just for the pleasure of doing it are André Malraux and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, neither of whom, by the way, enjoys the highest esteem of their current compatriots. But I have never gone any further than the desire. However, for a long time I have been translating drop by drop Giacomo Leopardi’s Cantos, but I do so in hiding and in my very scant free time, and in the full knowledge that this will not be the path to glory for either Leopardi or myself. I just do it as one of those bathroom pastimes that the Jesuit fathers used to call solitary pleasures. But the mere attempt has been enough to lead me to realize just how difficult it is, and how self-sacrificing, to try to compete with professional translators for their daily broth.

  It is unlikely that a writer could be satisfied with the translation of a work of his own. In each word, in each sentence, in each emphasis of a novel there is almost always a second secret intention that only the author knows. That’s why it is undoubtedly desirable that the writer himself should participate in the translation as far as possible. A notable experience in that sense is the exceptional French translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The basic first draft was done complete and alone by August Morell, who then worked toward the final version with Valery Larbaud and Joyce himself. The result is a masterpiece, barely improved on—according to those in the know—by the Brazilian Portuguese version by Antonio Houaiss. Whereas the only translation that exists into Spanish is almost nonexistent. But its history serves as an excuse. An Argentinian called J. Salas Subirat did it for himself, just as a distraction; in real life he was an authority on life insurance. The editor Santiago Rueda, of Buenos Aires, discovered it, unfortunately, and published it at the end of the 1940s. I met Salas Subirat a few years later in Caracas behind an anonymous desk in an insurance company and we spent a stupendous evening talking about English novelists, whom he knew almost by heart. The last time I saw him seems like a dream: he was dancing, quite old by then and more alone than ever, in the crazy parade of the Barranquilla carnival. It was such a strange apparition that I couldn’t make up my mind to say hello.

  Other historical translations are those that Gustav Jean-Aubry and Phillipe Neel did of Joseph Conrad’s novels into French. This all-time great writer—who was really called Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski—had been born in Poland, and his father was a translator of English authors, including Shakespeare. Conrad’s main language was Polish, but from a very early age he learned French and English, and he eventually became a writer in both those languages. Today we consider him, with reason or without it, as one of the masters of English literature. It is told that he made his French translators’ lives unlivable trying to impose his own perfection on them, but he never chose to translate himself. It’s odd, but not many bilingual writers do so. The closest case to us is Jorge Semprún, who writes in French and in Spanish, but always separately. He never translates himself. Stranger still is the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, Nobel Prize in Literature, who writes the same work twice in two different languages, but their author insists that one is not the translation of the other, but that they are two distinct works in two different languages.

  Some years ago, in the scorching summer of Patelaria, I had an enigmatic experience as a translator. Count Enrico Cicogna, who was my translator into Italian until his death, was translating the novel Paradiso, by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima, during that vacation. I am a devoted fan of Lezama Lima’s poetry, as I also was of his strange personality, though I had few occasions to see him, and at that time I wanted to get to know his hermetic novel better. So I helped Cicogna a little, less in the translation than in the tough business of deciphering the prose. It was then I understood that, in fact, to translate is the most profound way to read. Among other things,
we found a sentence whose subject changed gender and number several times in less than ten lines, to the point where by the end it was not possible to know who was who, or when, or where. Knowing Lezama Lima, it’s possible that such disorder was deliberate, but only he could have said so, and we were never able to ask him. The question Cicogna wondered about was whether the translator had to respect those blunders of agreement in Italian or if he should render them with academic correctness. My opinion was that he should conserve them, so the work would pass into the other language just as it was, not only with its virtues, but also with its defects. It is a duty of loyalty to the reader in the new language.

  For me there is no more boring curiosity than that of reading translations of my own books in the three languages it would be possible for me to do so. I don’t recognize myself, except in Spanish. But I have read some of the books translated into English by Gregory Rabassa and I have to admit that I found some passages that I liked more than I did in Spanish. The impression Rabassa’s translations give is that he memorized the book in Spanish and then went back and wrote the whole thing again in English: his fidelity is more complex than simple literalism. He never explains anything in a footnote, which is the least valid and unfortunately most well worn resource of bad translators. In this sense, the most notable example is that of the Brazilian translator of one of my books, who added a footnote to the word astromelia: “Imaginary flower invented by García Márquez.” The worst of it is that I later read somewhere that astromelias not only exist, as everyone knows, in the Caribbean, but that their name comes from the Portuguese.

  June 21, 1982, El País, Madrid

  Sleeping Beauty on the Airplane

  She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds, and her hair was straight and black and all the way down her back, and she had an aura of oriental antiquity that could just as easily have come from Bolivia as from the Philippines. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a silk blouse with very faint flowers, natural linen slacks, and flat shoes the color of bougainvillea. “This is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” I thought, when I saw her in the boarding line for the New York flight from Paris in the Charles de Gaulle airport. I stepped aside for her, and when I arrived at the seat assigned by my boarding pass, I found her settling into the seat next to mine. Almost breathless I managed to wonder which of the two of us had the bad luck of that terrifying coincidence.

  She settled in as if she were going to live there for several years, putting each thing in its place in a perfect order, until her personal space was arranged like an ideal home where everything is within reach. While she was doing this, the steward offered us a welcoming glass of champagne. She didn’t want one, and she tried to explain something in rudimentary French. The steward then spoke to her in English, and she thanked him with a stellar smile, and asked for a glass of water, and not to be woken for any reason during the flight. Then she opened on her lap a large, square vanity case, with copper corners like our grandmothers’ travel trunks, and she took two golden tablets from a box that contained more of many different colors. She did everything in a methodical and unhurried way, as if there had never been anything unforeseen for her since her birth.

  Finally, she put the little pillow in the corner against the window, covered herself with the blanket up to her waist without taking her shoes off, and turned on her side in the seat, almost in a fetal position, and slept without a single pause, without a sigh, without the tiniest change in position, for the seven terrifying hours and the extra twelve minutes the flight to New York lasted.

  I have always believed that there is nothing more beautiful in nature than a beautiful woman. So it was impossible for me to escape the spell of that fabulous creature sleeping at my side even for an instant. It was such a stable sleep that at a certain moment I was concerned that the tablets she’d taken were not for sleeping but for dying. I contemplated her many times inch by inch, and the only signs of life I could detect were the shadows of her dreams that passed across her forehead like clouds over water. She had a chain around her neck so fine it was almost invisible on her golden skin, perfect unpierced ears, and a plain band on her left hand. Since she looked no older than twenty-two, I consoled myself with the idea that it wasn’t a wedding ring but just that of a happy and ephemeral engagement. She wasn’t wearing any perfume: her skin exhaled a tenuous breath that could not be anything but the natural fragrance of her beauty. “You on your sleep and on the sea the ships,” I thought, twenty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, trying to remember in order Gerardo Diego’s unforgettable sonnet. “Knowing that you sleep, certain, safe, faithful channel of abandonment, pure line, so close to my manacled arms.” My reality so resembled that of the sonnet that within half an hour I had reconstructed it in my memory to the end: “What terrifying islander slavery, I sleepless, crazed, on the cliffs, the ships on the sea, you on your sleep.” Nevertheless, after five hours of flight having contemplated the sleeping beauty so much, and with so much undirected anxiety, I suddenly understood that my state of grace was not in the Gerardo Diego sonnet, but in another masterpiece of contemporary literature, The House of the Sleeping Beauties, by the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata.

  I discovered this lovely novel by way of another long path, but which in any case concluded with this sleeping beauty on the airplane. Several years ago, in Paris, the writer Alain Jouffroy phoned to tell me that he wanted to introduce me to some Japanese writers who were at his house. The only thing I knew of Japanese literature at the time, apart from sad high school haikus, were a few stories by Junichiro Tanizaki that had been translated into Spanish. Actually, the only thing I knew for sure about Japanese writers was that all of them, sooner or later, ended up committing suicide. I had heard people talk about Kawabata for the first time when they gave him the Nobel Prize in 1968, and then I tried to read something of his, but I fell asleep. A short while later he disemboweled himself with a ritual saber, as another notable novelist, Osamu Dazai, had done in 1946, after several frustrated attempts. Two years before Kawabata, and also after several frustrated attempts, the novelist Yukio Mishima, who might be the best known in the West, had done a complete hara-kiri after directing a patriotic harangue to soldiers of the Imperial Guard. So when Alain Jouffroy called me on the phone, the first thing that came to mind was the cult of death that Japanese writers seemed to have. “I’ll come over with great pleasure,” I told Alain, “but on the condition that none of them commit suicide.” They did not kill themselves, and instead we spent a charming night, during which the best thing I learned was that they were all mad. They agreed. “That’s why we wanted to meet you,” they told me. Finally, they convinced me that for Japanese readers there was no doubt that I was a Japanese writer.

  Trying to understand what they meant, I went the next day to a specialist bookshop in Paris and bought all the books available by those authors. Shusaku Endo, Kenzaburo Oé, Yasushi Inoue, Akutagawa Ryonosuke, Masuji Ibusi, Osamu Dazai, as well as the obvious ones by Kawabata and Mishima. For almost a year I read nothing else, and now I am convinced: Japanese novels have something in common with mine. Something I could not explain, that I did not feel in the life of the country during my only visit to Japan, but that seems more than evident.

  However, the only one I would have liked to have written is Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties, which tells the story of a strange mansion in the suburbs of Kyoto where elderly bourgeois men pay enormous sums to enjoy the most refined form of last love: to spend the night contemplating the city’s most beautiful girls, who lie naked and tranquilized in the same bed. They cannot wake them, or even touch them, though nor do they try to, because the purest satisfaction of that senile pleasure was to be able to dream at their sides.

  I lived this experience beside the sleeping beauty on the airplane to New York, but I was not pleased. On the contrary: the only thi
ng I desired in the last hour of the flight was for the steward to wake her up so I could regain my freedom, and maybe my youth. But it didn’t happen that way. She woke up on her own once the plane was already on the ground, fixed herself up, and stood without looking at me, and she was the first one off the plane and disappeared forever into the crowd. I stayed on the same flight to Mexico, pampering the first traces of nostalgia for her beauty beside the seat still warm from her sleep, unable to get what the crazy writers in Paris had said about my books out of my head. Before landing, when they gave me the customs card, I filled it out with a sense of bitterness. Profession: Japanese writer. Age: 92 years old.

  September 20, 1982, Proceso, Mexico City

  Writer Wanted

  I often wonder what is most lacking in my life, and I always answer with the truth: “A writer.” The joke is not as silly as it seems. If I ever found myself with the unavoidable commitment of writing a fifteen-page story by tonight, I would turn to my countless notes going way back and I am sure I would make it to press in time. Maybe it would be a very bad story, but the commitment would be met, which after all is the only thing I meant to say with this nightmare example. However, I would not be able to write a telegram of congratulations or a letter of condolences without ruining my liver for a week. For those undesirable duties, as with so many others of social life, most writers I know wish they could appeal to the good offices of other writers. This column I write every week, and which on one of these October days is going to celebrate its first two years of solitude, is without doubt good proof of my almost barbarian sense of professional honor. Only once has this corner been missing my column, and it was not my fault: it was a last-minute failure of the transmission system. I write it every Friday, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, with the same will, the same conscience, the same joy, and often the same inspiration with which I should have written a masterpiece. When I don’t have a well-defined topic I go to bed grumpy on Thursday night, but experience has taught me that the drama will resolve itself while I sleep and will begin to flow in the morning, as soon as I sit in front of the typewriter. However, I almost always have several topics planned in advance, and bit by bit I gradually collect and order the data from various sources and check them very rigorously, for I have the impression that readers are not as indulgent with my blunders as they might be with those of that other writer who I need. My first aim with these notes is that every week they should teach something to the average readers who are the ones that interest me, even if those teachings might seem obvious and maybe puerile to the wise university grads who already know everything. My other aim—the more difficult one—is that they should always be written as well as I am able without the help of the other, for I have always believed that good writing is the only happiness that is enough in and of itself.