Personae Read Free Page A

only a portion of what was placed in the notebook has been recovered. Various forms of damage, over time, befell the notebook. It was never the highest quality paper to begin with and pencil starts fading the moment it hits such paper. In many cases what is displayed here is the result of various techniques designed to uncover the lost. So, for example, the many instances where what was once clear and distinct devolved into invisibility but not quite because the impressions remained: tiny canals dug into the sheets and still readable once magnified and interpreted. Predictably the result often feels fragmentary or inchoate, perhaps heightening the effect that what we have here are halting steps towards future cohesion. All by way of maybe apologizing for the imminent lack of symmetry, narrative propulsion, cheap suspense, or any of the other décor generally sought by eyeballs like yours:
     
. . . write because of an aesthetic impulse to order the world into greater attractiveness, which ordering…
 
English is richer than Spanish, just is, and I want primarily to be rich.
 
Art seems at least a subspecies of Love because in Art we sense Love’s greatest response yet to Life’s inherent cruelty.
 
I do not like to talk about what I’ve written, I do not like to talk about how or why I write, I do not like to talk about myself, what I’ve seen and done or what it’s like to be me now, I do not like to talk.
 
Joseph Conrad was twenty-one before he even heard English. Twenty-one! Conrad!
 
Now that you’re found, I’m lost.
Now that you feel love, I don’t.
 
. . . the selfsame beauty runs through it.
 
Okay just off the top of my head because life is brief and real work beckons. Take out your copy ( Cien años de soledad ) and follow along. What follows is mine (with crucial differences sometimes italicized) and therefore what a just world would have received:
 
Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to recall that remote afternoon in which his father took him to discover ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty adobe houses constructed on the edge of a river of diaphanous waters that flowed over a bed of smooth stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs.
 
The specific sounds of the letters, word order, relative incidence, line length, syntax; if you can preserve these and maintain fidelity to meaning shouldn’t you? Moving on:
 
The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and to mention them one had to point with a finger.
 
It was necessary to is so terrible here, though maybe not as bad as in order to just before it. If this was GGM’s intent there were perfectly valid and expected Spanish equivalents. If you don’t know them your Spanish isn’t good enough, if you know them and ignore the above reasoning it’s your English that’s likely the problem.
 
Every year, in March, a family of derelict gypsies would stake its tent near the village and with a great commotion of whistles and bells display the latest inventions.
 
Stake, derelict, and commotion are just plain better; whistles just plain correct.
 
First they brought the magnet.
 
Hard to mess that up so no one did.
 
A corpulent gypsy with an unkempt beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquiades, made a truculent public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the sage alchemists of Macedonia.
 
Heavy and bold are so unjustifiable in light of the above options that I lose all faith in the endeavor. Yet somehow, like eyeballs to a gruesome car accident, I skip ahead past insufferable clunkiness and inartistry to:
 
In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a lens the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They sat a gypsy woman at one end of the village and installed the telescope at the entrance to the tent. Upon payment of five reales, people would look through