License and Senility

The recent translation of Gabriel García Márquez's frankly titled Memoria de mis putas tristes has occasioned a few reviews, mildly disapproving for the most part, with one very admiring, by John Updike, and one very damning, by Adam Kirsch. From the shrill and sure tone of his writings one surmises that Kirsch is not many summers out of private school (a "Harvard '97" turns up next to his name, soon enough, when googled), and it is not insignificant, for reasons that in the next paragraph become clear, that Memoria should be most favorably judged by its maturest reviewer (Harvard '54) and utterly misjudged by its greenest. Both reviews are worth reading for that reason, even if neither gets it right.

The book's plot (and, indeed, problem) is summed up in its opening line. As Updike notes, García Márquez is "a master of the arresting first sentence":

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

[El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen.]

Arresting indeed, in every sense of the word (including, potentially, the cardiological and constabulary). If Kirsch never seems to recover from the shock of this typically Marquezian opening, both frank and fanciful at once like much of the author's magic realism (the 'magic,' as Kirsch puts it, "annuls the 'realism'..."), Updike appears weirdly unflapped, merely noting the proximity between the author's age and that of the narrator and adding that many of the details seem "lifted" from García Márquez's own life. He no doubt found unnecessary even to mention what Kirsch felt compelled to spell out, namely that "[t]he purchase of a child prostitute, if it were reported in a newspaper rather than imagined in a novel, is just the kind of exploitation most likely to enrage the very people who read Mr. Garcia Marquez," an exploitation that Kirsch feels equally compelled to denounce as "monstrous" and "pathetic."

The translation, however, by the much admired Edith Grossman, gives pause only for its clumsiness. There are a couple of words too many here ("wanted to give myself the gift of a night of..."), while a crucial equivocation in the expression "amor loco" goes entirely unregistered (Grossman's "wild love" captures the indelicacy of the proposition but admits none of its madness).

A better translation, therefore, more faithful and fluent at the same time, might have run: "The year of my nintieth birthday I wanted to award myself a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin."

Finally, still with regard to the translation, it is remarkable that no review has mentioned the trouble with its title, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. "Sad whores" evidently struck Grossman as either too harsh, since it includes the subjective sense of "sad" (corresponding to the Spanish tristes putas, as opposed to the objective putas tristes of the title) or too unpoetic—or both. García Márquez, at any rate, did not write putas melancólicas. Between sad and melancholy could not a more deserving word be found? Even Memories of My Unhappy Whores would have made for a happier, if not entirely felicitous, solution.

Many have attested to the quality of Grossman's translation, but given the not insignificant problems with both its title and its first sentence, which are surely two of the most, if not the two most, important lines of the work to be translated, one remains skeptical.