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Comment by purplebutterfly | Hacker News Reader

Not to be pedantic, but the Rabassa translation reads: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

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Prefacing pedantry with "not to be pedantic" doesn't make what you're about to say not pedantic.

Fair enough. My intention was to avoid attacking the original quotation while still maintaining the actual translation.

"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."

I think rjtavares' quote is more faithful. Except for "conocer", it should be "know ice" or maybe "know about ice", not "see" or "discover".

But the thing about translating poetic literature is that the translator also needs to be a poet.

I think "see ice for the first time" might work.

You just provided the best translation :-)

Now I'm wondering if the translators were intentionally trying to avoid multiple words, or if they didn't realize how much meaning they were losing.

Sometimes you have to just leave meanings implied to avoid being very discursive. Why would you take a child to see ice? Why would it be significant? "See" doesn't usually carry that connotation of "for the first time", but really the sentence can't possibly mean anything else.

Exactly.

The sentence in English is translated perfectly in this instance - the underlying implication of 'to see ice' carries the exact same meaning as the Spanish.

Not really. "to see ice" in English is more dubious than the phrase in Spanish, as you don't really know whether or not the character is doing it for the first time. A translation closer in meaning would be "to get to know ice".

This whole debate is why the translator chose "discover". It's a bit awkward because it can be interpreted two ways, but in one of the ways it carries the connotation of seeing for the first time, without the lengthy phrase "to get to know" or "to see for the first time" disrupting the rhythm of the prose.

The crux of the problem, of course, is that the word "meet" in English only applies to people.

"The crux of the problem, of course, is that the word "meet" in English only applies to people."

Says who? The last time I met with danger, I won! ;-)

"Meet" in the sense of being introduced, not in the sense of two entities coming into contact.

Don't forget that the translator knows just as well as you or I what the Spanish means - he also understands what it means when you take a child to see something - an expression that almost without exclusion means taking a child to see something for the first time.

"To get to know" takes us further away from the meaning, not closer.

I agred this translation gives a better idea of how old timer sounds the original.

This is a more accurate translation of the Spanish, although slightly less elegant than the previous one IMHO.

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