Melted in the Crucible

All too often a writer's powerful poetic diction is distorted in translation in order to make it easier for the reader to understand. Like blunting a knife. An extraordinary writer like Carlos Ruiz Zafón, however, speaks also through the images his language evokes. A simplified translation that merely "tells the story" is not good enough. I now offer my own translation of an excerpt from the first chapter of his masterpiece  La sombra del viento : Shortly after the civil war, an outbreak of cholera took my mom. We buried her in Montjuic on the day I turned four. All I remember is that it rained all day and all night, and that when I asked my dad if heaven was crying, he was deeply moved and couldn't speak. Six years later, the memory of my mom was like a hallucination to me, a silence full of screams that I had not yet learned to appease with words ... I grew up among books, making invisible friends out of pages that crumbled in dust and whose smell I still have ...