First draft

Translation: “Por un país al alcance de los niños” by Gabriel García Márquez

Juan Fernando Alvarado

What I plan to do for my Personal Writing Project is a translation of a speech pronounced by Gabriel García Márquez in the ceremony of report presentation of the “Misión de Ciencia y Educación y Desarrollo” on July 1994. In this speech the author explains in a very critic way how the process of colonization has a repercussion on the society as we know it nowadays. How through education the problems that the author mentions can be resolved.

This translation is intended to be read by people that are involved in the educational field, the foreign languages students and teachers, and everybody who is interested, it´s such a great speech that everyone should have the possibility to read even if they don´t know Spanish.

One of the great challenges of this work is referencing some expressions that the author uses, that are intended to be understood by the Latin societies and especially by the Colombian society. I will analyze those expressions and provide an explanation to the reader in order to be fully understood.

I will begin with the first two paragraphs of the speech:

For a Nation at the Reach of Children

The first men who came from Spain to the New World lived astonished by the singing of the birds, thrilled by the purity of the scents and in few years they exterminated an exquisite kind of non-barking dogs that the Indians raised for food. Many of these people, and others who came along later, were criminals with liberty under parole, with not many reasons to stay around. Much less reasons had the native residents to want them to stay.

Christopher Columbus, with the support of a letter from the Kings of Spain to the Emperor of China, had discovered this paradise by geographical mistake, a mistake that changes the course of history. The eve of his arrival, before hearing the flight of the birds in the darkness of the sea, he had perceived a flower scent that to him was the sweetest thing he had ever smelled. In his diary he wrote that natives had welcomed the crew naked, that the natives were beautiful and kind, so naturally naïve that the crew traded everything they had for colorful necklaces and cheap metal rattles. But their hearts turned black when they realized that the natives’ nose rings were made of gold, also the bracelets, earrings and necklaces; some even played with gold bells and hid their shames in a capsule made of gold. It was this decorative magnificence, not their human values, which condemned the natives to be the main characters to this new Genesis that started. Many of them died without even knowing where the invaders had come from. Many died without knowing where they were. Here we are, five centuries later, descendants of both Indians and Spanish, without knowing who we really are.