Abu Dhabi, Sept. 7th, 2011 (WAM) -- Kalima, the translation project of the Abu Dhabi Authority of Culture and Heritage (ADACH), has published the Arabic translation of the novel "La Tregua" (The Truce), written by Mario Benedetti and translated into Arabic by Saleh Almani. The Uruguayan author is one of Latin America's most important 20th-century writers.
The novel was written in the form of memoirs of a character named 'Martin Santome', a widowed clerk who is approaching his fifties and had spent most of his life among accounts books. The protagonist feels that it was too late to achieve something important in his life, where even learning to play the guitar would be difficult at that age, and descends into a mood of weariness of what the future might hold, dreading the empty long hours that await him after retirement. In his calendar, he had been calculating the countdown to this day for over five years, and now he has only six months and 28 days before his retirement. With these fears, Santome's memoirs begin and they continue till the end of the novel. As his time in the office moves towards its end, he ponders what life without work would be like. To add to his troubles, life at home is not at its best either. He has three grownup children living with him, whom he had to bring up alone after the death of his wife. But they are now in their twenties and thirties, with their own jobs, and his relationship with them is not always smooth. The greyness of his office life and the coldness at home made Santome a very lonely and sad man. However, his life takes a turn after he meets Lora, the new girl in the office who is half his age. With sombre eyes, she is smart, confident and dedicated to her work. His love for her brings new light and a long-deprived happiness to his life, but fate would have it that this would only be a short-lived phase, like a temporary 'truce' that would soon end with the return of misfortune. A tale of life and death, loneliness and love, happiness and misery, as well as politics, the novel was translated to many languages, and had been adapted for the cinema, television, radio and the theatre.Copyright Emirates News Agency (WAM) 2011.
