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.

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