a little help please

[kernsy]

hello, i found this site hoping i could get some help becuase no other sites were working. i am a highschool student currently ready "El coronel no tiene quien le escriba" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. i have to do a report on the book and am having some trouble translating and understanding the book. if you could help me, more specifically with chapter 5 on translations and summary that would be great. thanks again.

Matt

p.s. you can reach me by sending an email to [email protected] or replying to this thank you!

[den]

Oh yum, one of my all-time favourite authors! Haven't been able to find any of his works online in etext, but below is a semi-decent translation site. You can enter up to approx. 1800 words at a time, and if you know basic spanish you can get the gist of sentences.

Good luck! :D


http://www.freetranslation.com/index.htm

[den]

"No One Writes to the Colonel is especially brilliant in form. The colonel is in his mid seventies and he and his wife are down to their very last money, selling off family heirlooms to eat. They are waiting for his pension to begin, awaiting the letter which will announce it and bring them the income for life to which he is entitled. However, they've been waiting now for more than 15 years, the colonel going everyday to the post office to see if the letter has come. The pace of the story is as slow and ponderous as the colonel's resolve and faith that the pension must come. Even in their growing hunger they maintain the life of the fighting **** which their son left when he supposedly was killed for political reasons a year ago. While the colonel's wife is in deep mourning for her son, the colonel knows that actually, he lives and is in hiding. He keeps his son's **** alive for much the same reason he keeps hoping for his pension -- to seek a meaning to living beyond the mere fact of eating. All the while Marquez makes us feel the pace of their lives in the slow moving, somnolent pace of the story."

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/marquez-colonel.html