the shadow of the wind
karen bought a second-hand book entitled shadow of the wind by carlos ruiz zafon for P175.00. it's already a translation. to my book-lover's eye, it was an extremely good find considering the price. the book is still mighty intact and there seems to be a very nice story waiting to be unraveled in its pages. she bought it last sunday, after her interview for the singapore asean scholarships, the undertaking of which only took 10 minutes. imagine waking up at 2 in the morning and traveling for 5 hours just to sit a spell with three singaporeans?
anyhow, just awhile ago, i started to read it, beginning with the praises splayed on the first two pages. and when i started with the story, it held me in its grip. it had that magic that makes it hard to put down. i thought i'd only read the first chapter but then i went on to the second, and many more paragraphs after the first sequence or part of the story was over. it held my attention, just like how the book in the story was doing to the soul of the main character. i know the book will be a very good one. i am looking forward to when i can finally read it without distractions. as of now, i cannot do that because i have plenty of things to attend to in my acad life. and even if i would, i can't bring it with me when i go back to up tomorrow because that's karen's book and she hasn't read it yet. but the magic of its pages hasn't left me yet. it feels like it's the same book the boy was reading, since they are of the same title though in the story, it is written by a certain Julian Carax. and even if i can't read a synopsis of the book, i feel like i would buy it from the cover itself. it's really something. it still leaves me awestruck, like it's a book that could change my life in a lot of ways. the soul of the main character is in ways akin to mine. we are serious book lovers. we would read anything, new or old. i wish i had my own cemetery of forgotten books.
books over anything
books are one of my greatest passions in life. along with it are music and movies. if i had to choose one among the three to be my only companion in life, i would choose books. there's the pleasure in taking journeys with another character and delving into a different state of mind. the power of the written word is truly far-reaching. it can take you any place and make you feel anything. the different sceneries provide for various enjoyment in a day of reading a book. this isn't much to convince anyone who doesn't feel the same as i do but as of now, words fail me to clearly express my most sublime feeling towards these great artifacts of culture.
language in books
books do use different language styles, from old english to hillbilly to british english to ghettospeak. there's been plenty of times when after reading a book i would write something, i try to write in the way that conversations in that book was written. yes, there's been plenty of times. although i'm not very successful at it and it wasn't really a conscious choice, they just come out like it's the natural way to say them. but they're very few and far between, at times occuring just in the first line. :D
like the expression "mighty intact" above. it's not really being used in the book i last read but it seems much the way the characters said things. making adverbs out of adjectives which should remain as such. the other one, "sit a spell" was used in that book. it's the new york times bestseller the songcatcher by sharyn mccrumb, another of karen's finds for P40.00. i realize now that most of the books i've read for the past week have been karen's - well, at least two that i've finished: the songcatcher and jane eyre. and i really want to start on the shadow of the wind. although i also got to finish one of stephen king's short stories in the skeleton crew, a second-hand find of mine back in cebu.
the language in itself is one main characteristic of the book. it sets the mood of the story. it tells you what may happen in the story and what may not. translating books must be really hard work. the writer has woven the spell in the original language and you have to recreate that same effect to those who'll be reading it in another language. it's not just the direct translation of the words. you can say a single sentence in a number of different ways but it takes a good sense of harmony with the words and an understanding of the book's cultural context to be able to transcribe the original effect to something very similar, albeit in another language.
that's why marquez's a hundred years of solitude, coelho's the alchemist, eleven minutes and others have considerably touched readers' souls. their translators must've incorporated the original writer's souls when they did them. hail to them for letting non-readers of the language enjoy these glorious works.
literature.
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