searching for words that do not exist

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 in my hands. At an early age I learned to sleep as I talked to mom in the dim light of the room about what had happened that day, what I had done in high school, what I’d learned... Sometimes dad listened to me from the dining room and cried softly.

I remember I woke up screaming that night in June. My heart thudded in my chest as if my soul wanted to break free from my body and throw itself down the stairs. Dad rushed into the room scared and held me in his arms, trying to calm me down.

"Can’t remember her face! Can’t remember mom's face!” I groaned gasping.

My father hugged me tightly.

"Don’t worry, Daniel. I'll remember for both of us.”

We looked at each other in the dark, searching for words that did not exist. That was the first time I realized that my father was getting old and that his eyes, eyes of mist and loss, were always looking back.