118. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) — now a major motion picture, and one, I imagine, full of lush greenery, magnificent flashing eyes and flowing drapery, though I haven’t seen it — got its title through an opportunity for a pun that does not exist in English. Cólera, in Spanish, means both ‘cholera’ and ‘anger’.

Of course! Cholera, choler, choleric...choler was one of the four medieval humours, responsible, when present in excess, for fits of anger and bile. The disease must have been so named in the past because of this relation to medieval diagnostics. But to relate love and cholera so closely? That’s class. In fact, love, cholera and anger are all related in the novel: the symptoms of cholera are explicitly identified with those of love, and it is love that inspires the anger of Florentino Ariza against his rival Juvenal Urbino, who happens to be an expert...in cholera.

Punning titles in foreign novels of course pose difficulties for the translator. Another interesting example is Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin, usually translated, a little inadequately, as The Wild Ass’s Skin (and mentioned in a previous post). Chagrin is a pun in French meaning both ‘grief’ and ‘shagreen’ (a type of leather made from a wild ass skin); and in the story it is the magic ass’s skin, which grants any wish, that ensures that the hero comes to grief.