And since part of Rulfo’s genius is how each sentence leads to the next with magnetic intensity, I had to give the second line a try. On a piece of scratch paper I began playing with the words till I got something that sounded almost right. I’m certainly not going to translate it.”īut as sometimes happens, that fall, while working on something else entirely, I began to wonder how one might translate the book’s first line more fully. “Ah, well,” I thought to myself, “I guess I can’t share it with friends after all. Nothing of the magic I’d encountered was there. Eagerly I opened the volume to the first page, to the lines that had so captivated me in the Spanish. “I have to share this with friends,” I thought when I returned home, and went straight to the library to find a translation. Very quickly I found myself deeply in love, reading the book five times back to back, as I hadn’t done with a book since I was a child.
Each morning before breakfast, I climbed the stairs to the upstairs room of my Tamil teacher’s house and read Rulfo’s Spanish out loud for an hour. In 2003 I took a copy of the book with me to India where I was studying the relationships between people and land in Tamil on a Fulbright Grant. Since 2005 I’ve been working on a new translation into English of Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece, Pedro Páramo.
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