When nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez turned 80 last month, in New Delhi — thousands of miles away from the author’s birthplace in the Colombian town of Aracataca — a Bengali was poring over a delicate issue: how to get the right Bengali tone for Marquez’s articulation of South American life. The first line of Memories of My Melancholy Whores — ‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin’ — posed a problem for Amitabha Ray, a deputy advisor at the Planning Commission in Delhi and a well-known Bengali translator of Marquez’s works. The brashness of Marquezian risqué might well affront Bengali sensibilities, says Ray. “You know how things are. If I do a direct translation of many of the words, it might raise a stink. And if I chuck them, much of the charm of the text is gone. The book is brilliantly profound and philosophical and every sentence has to be very skillfully handled,” he adds. But Marquez’s magical lands are not alien to Bengalis, who know and love their literature. There are similarities between Bengali life and Latin American mores — both societies are woven together by an intrinsically laidback charm, and where, notwithstanding the daily struggle, arts and artists find their due — which makes the translator’s work easier. Not surprisingly, Galposamagro, Ray’s Bengali translation of Marquez’s short stories published recently, has received a response enthusiastic enough for him to press ahead with work on Memories of My Melancholy Whores. “There are striking similarities between the cultures. Starting from their intermingling with immigrant communities like the Chinese, to their love for sports and entertainment, the bonds are fascinating. Possibly, this explains why Bengali readers find it easy to relate to works of South American authors like Pablo Neruda and Mario Vargas Llosa, and especially Marquez,” says Milon Brahmachary, who works in the Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi, and took the initiative to translate Memories of My Melancholy Whores directly from Spanish with Ray. Noted Bengali author Sunil Gangopadhyay, who also wrote the preface to one of Marquez’s Bengali translations, says both the author and the society that he introduces have inspired Bengali writing. “Magic realism is something that many writers across the world have been motivated by. Though Bengali literature does not have the violent roots that Latin American literature has, possibly because of their exposure to tyranny, we can easily connect to a world where drugs, poverty, superstition go hand-in-hand with a love for the arts,” he notes. Reading trends in Kolkata support his statement. While the city has the usual number of readers of American and European pulp fiction, Indian writers in English and Bengali literature, the city has a definite bias towards Latin American writing, a genre of writing that goes well with the city’s ‘intellectual’ moorings, feels Tridib Chatterjee, secretary of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild. The guild has been organising the annual Kolkata Book Fair, one of the biggest in the world in terms of sheer size and popularity. At the fair, Brazil, Cuba and Chile have been the theme countries in the recent past. Chilean poet Raul Zurita has shared the chief guest’s honour along with the likes of Jacques Derrida and Gunter Grass. “Among Latin American writers, including Mario Vargas Llosa and Jacques Derrida, Marquez tops the list. We invited him earlier, but as he is a cancer patient and avoids such occasions, the visit has so far not materialized. But we will continue trying, for it will be our biggest honour if Marquez comes to the Kolkata Book Fair. The stress that we lay on South America only reflects the city’s reading habits,” says Chatterjee.Indeed, the Bengali literary market in Kolkata has recently seen a proliferation of Bengali translations of Marquez’s books. While smaller publishers like Papyrus and Anustup have been active with translations of Innocent Erendira and No One Writes To The Colonel, Dey’s Publishing, one of the biggest publishing houses in Kolkata, has taken a lead with three popular translated titles. “They are selling of course. One is already past its fourth print run,” informs Sudhangshu Sekhar Dey, owner of Dey’s Publishing. The book in question happens to be the Bengali translation of Clandestine in Chile by West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. The work is a gripping narration of the adventures of Chilean filmmaking legend, Miguel Littin. In the early 1980s, Littin, exiled during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, had under disguise and with a fake passport, entered Chile to film the effects of tyranny and the Resistance. As Littin mentioned during his recent visit to Kolkata during the annual film festival, his recollection of the story to Marquez at a Paris café formed the material for Marquez’s book, which Bhattacharjee later reworded into Bengali. It came as another reaffirmation of Marquez’s influence on the Kolkata psyche that Littin was riled by countless questions from the media and the public in Kolkata on his association with Marquez, more than on his films. Way back in 1995, Bhattacharjee, then yet to be the state’s chief minister or the poster boy of neo-Marxism, was moved enough by Chile’s suffering to consider a translation — as he writes in the preface of Chile te Gopone, the Bengali title. “The book seemed to come from his heart. Bhattacharjee already had the translation ready when I approached him,” informs Dey. The connection between Marx and Marquez is not something that can be disowned easily, says Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, a former professor of English at Jadavpur University’s Comparative Literature department and who has three Bengali translations of Marquez’s books to his credit. “It is significant that most Latin American writers, emerging from dictatorial regimes, have a Leftist side to them. That possibly works in Bengal,” he says. Decades ago and before the author won the Nobel or before the easy availability of his books in Kolkata, Bandyopadhyay had suggested One Hundred Years of Solitude to be included as a text for students to the syllabus committee of Jadavpur University, after himself being “deeply moved” by the novel. “Nobody had read his books then, and I was made fun of, though the book was included in the syllabus. But then, things changed after he won the Nobel in 1982. I have seen my students go out and spread the word about Marquez,” he recollects. Even while the author celebrated his 80th birthday and many years after the titles came out, One Hundred Years… and Love in the Time of Cholera continue to top the most-selling list in Kolkata, says Nirmalya Roychowdhury of Penguin, which has the publishing rights to the English translations of Marquez in India. “Maybe it’s in Kolkata’s Leftist leanings or maybe it’s about the humane touch in the writing, but even now in Kolkata, it’s difficult to go through college without a Marquez phase,” he adds. His increasing appeal across newer generations is what should hearten Marquez’s fans the most. Satramdas Motwani, an advisor to Oxford Bookstore, who has been in the book retailing profession for over 50 years, had witnessed the tepid response to One Hundred Years… when it was released in Kolkata years ago. Today, Motwani sees “the middle-aged, the not-so-middle-aged, the elderly and the not-so-elderly” patronizing Marquez’s penmanship. As Roychowdhury puts it: “There is a Marquez in every Bengali home.”
