[purplebutterfly]

Not to be pedantic, but the Rabassa translation reads: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

[psychometry]

Prefacing pedantry with "not to be pedantic" doesn't make what you're about to say not pedantic.

[purplebutterfly]

Fair enough. My intention was to avoid attacking the original quotation while still maintaining the actual translation.

[guelo]

"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."

I think rjtavares' quote is more faithful. Except for "conocer", it should be "know ice" or maybe "know about ice", not "see" or "discover".

But the thing about translating poetic literature is that the translator also needs to be a poet.

[mc32]

I think "see ice for the first time" might work.

[ramses]

You just provided the best translation :-)

Now I'm wondering if the translators were intentionally trying to avoid multiple words, or if they didn't realize how much meaning they were losing.

[jes5199]

Sometimes you have to just leave meanings implied to avoid being very discursive. Why would you take a child to see ice? Why would it be significant? "See" doesn't usually carry that connotation of "for the first time", but really the sentence can't possibly mean anything else.

[matnewton85]

Exactly.

The sentence in English is translated perfectly in this instance - the underlying implication of 'to see ice' carries the exact same meaning as the Spanish.

[brunorsini]

Not really. "to see ice" in English is more dubious than the phrase in Spanish, as you don't really know whether or not the character is doing it for the first time. A translation closer in meaning would be "to get to know ice".

[omegant]

I agred this translation gives a better idea of how old timer sounds the original.

[ternaryoperator]

This is a more accurate translation of the Spanish, although slightly less elegant than the previous one IMHO.