Living to Tell the Tale

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These tales, alongside the novelist's sensuous recollections of a childhood in 'the hermetic realm of the banana region', are poignantly framed by the account of a trip to sell the old family house. Vivir para contarla es, probablemente, el libro más esperado de la década, compendio y recreación de un tiempo crucial en la vida de Gabriel García Márquez. En este apasionante relato, el premio Nobel colombiano ofrece la memoria de sus años de infancia y juventud, aquellos en los que se fundaría el imaginario que, con el tiempo, daría lugar a algunos de los relatos y novelas fundamentales en la literatura en lengua española del siglo XX. García Márquez writes, “I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood” [pp. 74–75]. Why were women so important to him? How are the women different, in roles or in attitudes, from the men in García Márquez’s life? How does he portray his relationship with his mother?

I remember going down the corridor with one of the girls, chattering away in Cantonese. The deputy head – I was petrified of her – stopped us and said: ‘No, no, no, you should be speaking English in school.’ My dad found a job at a textile company owned by a Greek family. He would open up the factory first thing in the morning. At one point he spoke English with a Greek accent.” Quan speaks with an unmistakable London accent. Translation is an art and behind every great foreign-language author, there is a great translator capturing the tone, energy, and nuances of the work. For twenty-three years, Edith Grossman has been working with Gabriel García Márquez. As an award-winning translator of poetry and prose by several Spanish-language writers, she has mastered the skill of representing different tones and dialects, many of which we are not familiar with in America. Here, she talks about the experience of translating García Márquez’s most recent work, this long-awaited memoir.urn:oclc:830204769 Scandate 20110329004812 Scanner scribe7.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source García Márquez circles around in this memoir, focussing on the years when he actually became a writer (in his early twenties) but returning to his own childhood and youth and how the experiences from those times made him the writer he was becoming. Where it had muddled along all his life, it was with this one fell swoop thrust into the 20th century. The truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood” [p. 401]. What does the memoir convey about Colombia’s troubled political history? How critical to García Márquez’s formation as an adult was the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the violence that followed [pp. 312–13]? How is the experience of political upheaval here reflected in the historical or political consciousness of his fiction?

The one true disappointment of Vivir para contarla is, of course, that it only tells part of the story. García Márquez, whose splendid memoir of his first three decades, Living to Tell the Tale, is a swoon of swans" - John Leonard, Harper's He recounts his journalistic experiences, and his odd lifestyle -- sleeping wherever he can (most often in a local bordello).Something in her had changed, and this kept me from recognizing her at first glance. She was forty-five. Adding up her eleven births, she had spent almost ten years pregnant and at least another ten nursing her children. She had gone gray before her time, her eyes seemed larger and more startled behind her first bifocals, and she wore strict, somber mourning for the death of her mother, but she still preserved the Roman beauty of her wedding portrait, dignified now by an autumnal air. Before anything else, even before she embraced me, she said in her customary, ceremonial way: Leben, um davon zu erzählen jedoch ist ein eminent literarisches Buch: in der Struktur einfach, doch von außergewöhnlicher Präzision in der Wortwahl. Kaum ein anderer zeitgenössischer Schriftsteller benennt die Dinge so genau wie García Márquez. (...) García Márquez' Memoiren sind außergewöhnlich unterhaltsam, selbst da noch, wo der Autor die große Zahl seiner Verwandten nacheinander vorstellt" - Walter Haubrich, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung His political awareness is stirred only by the "same civil war we had been fighting since our independence from Spain", the fight between liberals and conservatives that has cost so many thousands of Colombian lives. The event that marks him most strongly is the killing of the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, and the ensuing violence leads him to declare that "on April 9 1948, the 20th century began in Colombia". For us, the crew were heroes’: Diep Quan, middle row far right, with her sister. They are pictured on the Wellpark after being rescued. Photograph: Mike Newton

García Márquez writes of his maternal grandparents’ house, where he spent the first eight years of his life, “I cannot imagine a family environment more favorable to my vocation than that lunatic house” [p. 90]. Which aspects of this household, and which people in it, have the strongest impact on the creative life of the child? As the passengers grew more fearful, Hung’s mother called for him and 15-year-old Huy to sit with her. “She called all the kids over so she could see us. We didn’t really understand, but now we know,” said Huy.

As we follow the struggles of the emerging writer, it also becomes clearer just what García Márquez means by that seemingly strange term, "solitude", that is present in all of his books. Despite the teeming life of the fiction, it is plain that Colombia, and to an even greater extent his tiny home town of Aracataca, is almost completely cut off from events taking place in the world outside. He convincingly describes it -- and the events surrounding family, acquaintances, and the nation -- as the inspiration-well for much of his writing. More factual than most of his writing, Vivir para contarla is still nearly as fantastic: if it weren't the truth (and much of it can only be considered truth by a very generous stretch of the imagination) it could practically pass for one of his novels. García Márquez writes, “I needed this old age without remorse to understand that the misfortune of my grandparents in the house in Cataca was that they were always mired in their nostalgic memories, and the more they insisted on conjuring them the deeper they sank” [p. 70]. He suggests that nostalgia does not play a significant role in his own life. How important is the concept of nostalgia to his fiction? What is the difference between nostalgia and the creative mining of memory? Vivir para contarla, von Dagmar Ploetz kongenial übersetzt, widerlegt alle Leerformeln und Klischees, die über García Márquez im Umlauf sind, denn anders als Rousseau legt er keine Beichte ab, sondern erzählt eine Geschichte, wie es sich für einen Romancier gehört (.....) Die Schwächen des Textes, der ohne Substanzverlust erheblich hätte gekürzt werden können, werden durch dessen Stärken wettgemacht." - Hans Christoph Buch, Die Welt