translated by Gregory Rabassa
Many years later, he will remember that rainy day when a ten-year old boy, who was spending his summer holidays in solitary daydreaming, opened a book by the author whose name did not ring any bells. The boy lived in a village which was connected with the rest of the world by a railway, although trains did not stop there very often. He didn’t think that the world around him was more interesting than the book which he was holding in his hands. The first sentence went like this:
Пройдёт много лет, и полковник Аурелиано Буэндиа, стоя у стены в ожидании расстрела, вспомнит тот далекий вечер, когда отец взял его с собой посмотреть на лёд.
He read the first paragraph and could not stop until he finished the book; then he started again from the beginning. Since then, his dream was to read this book in Spanish. That will eventually happen, although much later than “many years later”. But simply many years later he read it in English and was somewhat disappointed with the translation. In the meantime, he began discovering, or rather inventing, connections between himself and the far away country he did not even know existed until that rainy summer day.
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