Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Rabassa will doubtlessly translate García’s next major work, which Vargas has said has the title of El Otoño del Patriarca (“The Autumn of the Patriarch”). García has been working on it since before Cien Años, inspired by his exposure to the Jimenez dictatorship in Venezuela, and strengthened by what he learned of the Batista dictatorship during his time in Cuba, and the Rojas dictatorship in Colombia. The central figure is a Latin dictator who lives to be 270 years old.

  García’s alienation from right-wing politics raises the question of why he now lives in Spain under the Franco dictatorship. I asked how he felt about Spanish politics. He groaned and put his head in his hands as a reaction to a question whose public answer could jeopardize his residency in Barcelona, where he lives in apolitical peace.

  “If I were to choose a country which had politics that I like,” he said, “I would not live anywhere.”

  “A clever answer,” I said. “I won’t press the point.”

  “You are a gentleman,” he said.

  We talked of Barcelona as a place to live and I expressed my short-term admiration of its magnificence and the vibrancy of its life. I also told a trolley-car story: that when we crossed into Spain at Port Bou, we asked at the tourist window for some literature on Barcelona and were given a brochure which, among other things, detailed the trolley lines in the city, by number and destination. At Columbus Plaza we tried to get a trolley that would take us to Antonio Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia church, one of Barcelona’s wonders. A vendor of fresh coconut at the plaza explained that there hadn’t been any trolley cars in Barcelona for fourteen or fifteen years. Why, then, were they still mentioning them by name in the tourist literature? The coconut vendor had no answer and so we boarded a bus instead of a trolley and rode toward Gaudí’s monumental work. We stood at the back of the bus and watched the mansions and apartment buildings make splendid canyons out of the street, at times looking like I imagined Fifth Avenue must have looked in its most elegant nineteenth-century moments. And then I said to Dana: “Look, there’s a trolley.”

  She missed it, understandably. Its movement was perpendicular to our own. It crossed an intersection about three blocks back, right to left, visible only for a second or so, then disappeared behind the canyon wall.

  “What trolleys still run in Barcelona?” I asked García.

  He and his wife both said there were no trolleys in Barcelona. Mercedes remembered a funicular that went somewhere.

  “This one was yellow,” I said, “and old-fashioned in design.”

  “No,” she said. “The funicular is blue.”

  García called his agent, Carmen Balcells, on the phone. “Is there a yellow trolley car in Barcelona?” he asked. “I’m here having an interview with Kennedy and he saw a yellow trolley.”

  He listened, then turned to us and said, “All the trolleys were yellow in the old days.”

  He asked about the blue trolley, but Carmen said it was outside of town, nowhere near where we had been. In a few minutes she called back to say that about two years ago there was a public ceremony in which the last trolley car in Barcelona had been formally buried.

  What had I seen? I have no idea.

  “To me,” García said, “this is completely natural.”

  Then he told of hailing a taxi in Barcelona not long before this, but when he saw someone in the back seat he pulled down his arm. The cab driver stopped anyway and García then saw no one in the back seat. He explained this to the cabbie, who was outraged. “People are always seeing somebody in the taxi with me,” he told García.

  We had been drinking Scotch carefully for about five hours, lost in small talk and the free-form interchange of two languages. What had begun as a meticulous quest for the translation of phraseology through the intermediacy of Dana had loosened to the point where I was asking Dana questions in Spanish and she was talking to García in English. García was popping English phrases at me more and more, and I was fluently pidgin in Spanish. There was no comprehension problem. We praised the liberating effect of whiskey, but I downgraded it as a tool for writing. García agreed but hesitated: “There is a point where it works,” he said.

  It was a quarter to eleven, the theater hour in Barcelona, when García decided we should go to dinner. He drove, soberly, through the old streets, parked near an alley, and then led the way to what he called “the best secret restaurant in Barcelona.” I put on my steel-rimmed glasses to read the menu, but García said, “I have better glasses than those,” and took out a pair of steel-rimmed half-glasses.

  “Are you blind without them?” I asked.

  “Not quite,” he said, holding the menu as far away as he could. “My arm is still long enough.”

  I ordered baby squid in garlic and acceded to García’s choice of perdiz, which we finally figured out meant partridge. He ordered French wine, Côtes du Rhône, I think, which came in a dusty, crooked-necked bottle. He chewed a piece of bread, clearing his taste buds of old Scotch, before tasting the wine for approval.

  We had one more literary discussion at dinner. We had talked of politics and fiction earlier and he had mentioned a writer who, he felt, had hurt himself by overemphasizing politics, and whose work had changed. García considered this a loss. I then asked what he thought the proper place of politics was in fiction. He borrowed my pen and drew some intersecting vertical and horizontal lines in my notebook, creating twelve boxes. Beneath the boxes he wrote the word “ficción” and drew arrows to the left and right vertical borders. Then he wrote “politic” in the left central square. He paused. The vacant squares impelled him to further statement, and randomly, in two languages, he filled them in: “tristeza,” “love,” “humor,” “dinero,” “esperanza,” “muerte,” “nostalgia,” “vida,” and three question marks.

  There is another García drawing in my notebook; it shows a flower blooming atop a two-leafed potted plant and an open-mouthed fish about to bite on a dangling fishhook as a one-eyed sun rises, or perhaps sets, behind an undulating horizon. In homage to Kennedy, he included in the drawing a two-wheeled trolley on a track, off to the left, denoting it as “old yellow,” and he signed it in two places and included my own name with the year mentioned, 1972.

  We eventually left the restaurant, around one-thirty. I discovered I’d left my copy of the Vargas biography at the García apartment, but I was told not to worry, that there would be bookstalls open on La Rambla where we could get another copy. García drove to one but it was Mercedes who leaped out and bought the book; for how would it look, García said, for him to go out and buy his own biography at one-thirty in the morning?

  There was a conversation whose site I do not remember. Maybe it was the American bar, or maybe the apartment, or the best secret restaurant in Barcelona. But it has to do with García and his going back to Colombia every two or three years, and returning to Aracataca.

  “Each year less,” he said of the hometown, meaning each year the world he knew vanishes a little more. But there is a renewal. For each year, as the fame of Cien Años grows, Aracataca becomes more and more a place where tourists who have read the book go to compare its reality with the reality they have in their heads. They want to see the chestnut tree where José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of Macondo, died in beatific madness, tied to the trunk for years, seeing the ghosts of his past grow old along with him. They want to see the old Buendía house, and the plaza where thousands of striking banana workers were massacred by the army and their corpses taken on the longest train in the world to a remote point and dumped into the sea, so that not only would no evidence of their deaths remain but that the lie would be given to anyone brazen enough to suggest that a massacre had taken place.

  Years later that massacre would merely be a legend, its reality as accepted, yet as unverifiable, as the Trojan horse, or my yellow trolley car. García overheard it as a legend in Aracataca when he was young and he later reinvented it, just as he reinvented most of Macondo from bits and pieces of Aracataca, from the
storied or merely imagined past. The Macondo he created barely exists in Aracataca today, but that does not stop the enterprising small boys of the town from reinventing, with their imaginations, what the tourists want to see. For a few coins they will find José Arcadio Buendía’s tree and the place where the ants devoured the last newborn in the Buendía line, the infant that had been conceived incestuously and born with the tail of a pig. The cycle of the imagination is not dependent on any reality that can be bought at the hardware store like a seventy-eight-cent screwdriver.

  Writing fiction today, a friend once advised me, is about as significant as playing bridge. Possibly this is true for those who dwell in the Land of the Cat’s Titty. Possibly, for them, other things have replaced it. But in the face of a primordial event like the creation of Macondo, the argument is not worth rebutting. Whatever the numbers, and the numbers never mattered, there are still those who would rather dwell there for a time, and ride the yellow trolley car that may or may not exist, and thrive on the heat of a one-eyed sun, and draw sustenance from a book full of verities and question marks. Those who feel this have no need to justify their preference.

  A Bogota journalist went to Aracataca in 1969 and found that the home of García’s ancestors was being eaten to dust by ants, just as García had predicted the dust storm that would bury the Buendía house and the town forever. The journalist found ruins and solitude in the town, no doubt what he went to find, and which always exist everywhere if you look closely. But the fading of Aracataca was not the consequence of a cursed, fateful prophecy. It had been predicted by García Márquez not because he had chosen it to be that way in his godlike role as novelist, but because—like the gypsy Melquíades, who in Cien Años had written in the coded parchments that “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants”—he deciphered the key to history, and he knew that events occurred because they had to, that the turn of time was cyclical and that the vital, bloody warmth of every life held in itself not only its own dusty eventuality, but the seeds of regeneration as well.

  García’s nickname is Gabo, and the diminutive of that is Gabito. And in an Aracataca bar the Bogota journalist heard a song being sung which was really a song of the rebirth of this novelist, this man:

  It was in the land of Macondo,

  Where little Gabriel was born.

  All of the people knew him,

  By the name of Gabito.…

  1973

  * When I wrote this review for the National Observer it carried the headline “All of Life, Sense and Nonsense/ Fills an Argentine’s Daring Fable.” The only biographical information I had on García Márquez was from the book’s jacket copy, which identified him generically as a Latin American writer. Why no mention was made of his Colombian nationality I don’t know. Perhaps it was an effort to internationalize him as the author of the Great Latin American Novel, which is what he became with the publication of this book. The one identifying element in the book was its copyright note: “The book was first published in Argentina in 1967 by Editorial Sudamericana, S. A., Buenos Aires, under the title Cien Años de Soledad.” And so I called García Márquez an Argentine in print. Two years later I went to Barcelona and interviewed him, in part to discover who he was, which was even then an irrationally well-kept secret; and the story, The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, became the first biographical report on him in both the United States and England. When we talked in Barcelona I told García Márquez about my goof and he said: “Ah, so you’re the one.”

  Gregory Rabassa:

  Keeper of the Golden Key: An Interview

  “Heaven-sent or hell-bent, according to the critic,” writes Gregory Rabassa, “translation is really something apart from the other arts. But it is, indisputably, an art. Too often people have defined it in terms that only partially apply, for it has never received the massive attention given to other aspects of literature. It follows, it serves, it is the squire of the arts, but it was Sancho Panza who made Don Quixote possible.”

  And it has been Gregory Rabassa who has made Gabriel García Márquez possible in the English language, and Julio Cortázar, and a long list of other superior writers from Latin America and Spain during the past fifteen years. The works of these writers are widely appreciated in English today because Rabassa is a chameleonic stylist, a master of language, and a superb writer himself. The Rabassa shelf includes his own 1965 book on Brazilian fiction, written in Portuguese as an expansion of his doctoral dissertation, and, since 1966, twenty-four translations of novels and short-story collections from the Spanish and Portuguese, one translation of Brazilian literary criticism, five plays, and, in progress, two works of fiction and a volume of letters and sermons.

  Rabassa has been formally recognized for some of his work. For Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch he won the National Book Award for translation; and for Gabriel García Márquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch he won the P.E.N. Translation Award. Hopscotch gave him recognition, but it was his translation of García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the great fictions of the twentieth century, which, though it won him no prize, earned him the fame few translators ever realize.

  García Márquez became an international celebrity with that great novel, set in the mythical town of Macondo—a book that seems to embrace the history of mankind from Genesis and alchemy through the age of the biplane and aluminum foil. García Márquez’s Spanish is, in Rabassa’s opinion, classical on the order of Cervantes. But when one reads the English version there is no hint that this work was not conceived by a literary maestro working in English, such are the bright rhythms of the sentences, the surprises trapped by the transformations Rabassa makes in the author’s ebullient Spanish. “He doesn’t translate phrase by phrase,” García Márquez said of him. “I have the impression he reads the whole book and then writes it.”

  “He has such energy, and he’s covered such a range,” comments. Rabassa’s longtime colleague, Frank MacShane, director of the Translation Center (retiring in summer 1981) at Columbia University. “His name appears on so many books whose quality is very high. He’s been sensible to have done the very best. He was lucky to translate One Hundred Years, but it’s a two-way street. He helped to make it accessible.”

  Rabassa’s connection to One Hundred Years was a direct result of Hopscotch. Cortázar advised his friend García Márquez to have Rabassa do the English translation, but Rabassa was busy with Bomarzo, a long novel by the Argentine writer Manuel Mujica-Lainez. “Julio advised him to wait,” Rabassa recalled, and García Márquez waited a year. Then Rabassa attacked the novel and finished his remarkable translation in four months. It was published in the United States in 1970.

  Rabassa had already been courted by publishers after Hopscotch, but now the books began to pour into his office from publishers and Latin writers, “so many I haven’t been able to read them all,” he says in his office on the Queens College campus. The walls of the office reflect his ties to the Latin world and its languages: a poster announcing his lecture at Dartmouth on “Solitude as Failure in García Márquez,” a map of Brazil, a photo of the soccer wizard Pelé, a lapel button with the message Tentamos sempre fazer melhor ainda—the Portuguese translation of the Avis slogan, “We try harder”—and a poster from the Basque nation that looks vaguely Cyrillic but is wholly Basque and reads: Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, whose precise meaning Rabassa is unsure of. “I put that up to baffle people,” he says.

  Sitting there in his rumpled corduroy suit, and exuding a wickedly comedic mind—made manifest through his steady laughter and the crinkling of his eyes when he relishes a memory—Rabassa talks of how he works with his authors, and of his ties to them. He is close to Cortázar, who occasionally visits the Rabassa seaside home on Long Island, New York, and listens to old jazz records. And he is close enough to García Márquez to call him by his nickname, Gabo.

  “I understand Gabo and Fidel Castro are great friends,” Rabassa chuckles. “Fidel calls him u
p at two o’clock in the morning. I’m waiting for the day when some wild piece of news comes out of Cuba, some absurd thing Fidel has done, and you’ll know he took Gabo’s advice.”

  How does Rabassa differentiate the style of a García Márquez from a Cortázar and not impose his own syntax on the work? “I let them lead,” he says promptly. “I just sit down and let it go and if I get to a hard spot I stop and think about it. If you get too conscious about it you get self-conscious and that kills it. Do what comes naturally and García Márquez will sound like García Márquez and Cortázar will sound like Cortázar.”

  Was this wisdom the consequence of having a maestro whom he emulated? “I think it was the other way around. I wanted to avoid the artificiality you notice so much. Take Constance Garnett, for instance. Though I admire her very much for what she did, I don’t admire how she did it. I got suspicious when I was reading Dostoyevsky and he sounded just like Tolstoy. You could tell by the content they were two completely different people and wrote in different styles, and yet they came out sounding like Constance Garnett, a genteel English lady.”

  Rabassa came late to translation but the study of language was an early passion, stemming, he feels, from his perusal of his father’s late-nineteenth-century classic edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “If you picked up the article on Germany,” he recalls, “they’d have pages and pages of the German language, and the same on China and so on. I got to collecting words.”

  He was born in Yonkers in 1922; his mother was an American, his father an affluent Cuban in the sugar business in New York. Young Rabassa had no need to learn his father’s Spanish, since the elder Rabassa was fluent in English. But he absorbed culture from him (“my father was a fine piano player who played with Casals, his contemporary, in Barcelona”). The family moved from New York to New Hampshire when the sugar market collapsed not long after Gregory was born; there his father opened a small country inn near Dartmouth.