Pandemonium

Whenever I read, something quite peculiar happens to me. When I hear a strong recommendation of a book, I am unable to just read it. I have to wait sometime for all this hoopla to die down a bit to be able to put into perspective what I read.

That’s what happened to me with “The Name of The Rose”, “The Da Vinci Code” and many other books. That doesn’t mean I won’t search and devour the books by a certain author once I read the first one and like it.

And that’s what happened to me with Harry Potter.

About 4 months ago, I saw an offer in Amazon and I decided it was finally time to read these books. They were offering the 6 books in hardcover, in a boxed set, for under 100 dollars (about 70 euros). I ordered them and I have been reading Harry Potter since then, intermingled with other books.

The first 2 books I read them in two seatings. Sure you’ll tell me they were the shortest ones, but the longest in the set, “Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix”, also went down in 2 seatings. The third one, though, “Harry potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”, took me a long month to finish (it’s quite a bad idea to mix movies and books; in fact, movies should be watched after reading the books, so that they won’t interfere with the reading)…

Last night I finished the last one, “Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince”.

I have already pre-ordered the seventh book from Amazon. I am not crazed about Harry Potter, But I want to see how the saga ends. I have quite a clear idea of where it’s leading, so if you want a spoiler, let me know and I will spoil the book for you in a jiffy.

What do you want me to say about Harry Potter? I loved the first book, where they rescue Harry from his Muggle family to send him to Hogwarts. It’s the first book and Rowling had to develop the magical universe for the saga, and that’s why I liked it so much. Are these books for kids? For the amount of imagination you may say yes, but the vocabulary and the feelings portrayed move me to say no.

P.

I mentioned in my previous entry that the translation into English of “Perfume”, the novel by Patrick Süskind, is not very good. At least the translation I read (and stopped giving away) when I was in the US.

In 1992 they released the movie “Like Water for Chocolate”, based on the novel with the same title by Laura Esquivel. The writer and her husband participated actively in the making of the movie so the final product was quite good. After seeing it in the theater, the next day I went out to buy the book. Carbondale was a small town and didn’t offer too many books in Spanish. So I bought it in English, trying to calm down my desire for the novel before my next visit to St. Louis, where I would find it in Spanish. I read it in one sitting and it seemed to me a second-rate book, lacking all the magic I’d seen on the screen.

From that moment on, I was gnawed by the following question: Was it a bad translation or did English lack the syntactic and semantic resources to express magic realism?

In the following months I devoured all novels written originally in English by authors of Hispanic origin, or focused on Hispanic themes. I discovered a wealth of good novels, and magic realism was alive and kicking, thanks.

How many times the novels we read and deem weak are a translating snafu?

P.

I usually like subtitled movies. Long time ago, I discovered that Hollywood artists did not speak plain Castilian. Around that time I also discovered that banks were not gigantic warehouses filled with shoe boxes to keep clients’ money. I was quite naive, indeed. Of course, in my world cathedrals had the choir at the back of the nave and the main entrance was on one side. This is a disadvantage of growing up in Plasencia, which Gothic cathedral is unfinished (they started building it on the same site where the Romanesque cathedral stood, which was being demolished, so both of them are unfinished…). The first time I saw a finished cathedral, I was taken aback by the choir in the middle of the nave, putting another obstacle between men and God… Oh, well!

Yesterday I sank lower than I thought possible, because I saw Dustin Hoffman chattering in French (dubbed, of course)…

I can’t wait to see “Perfume: The Story of a Killer”, one of my favorite novels. I am a little afraid, though. The translation into English was not that good…

P.