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Lotaria
Ermes Marana is a counterfeit translator who claims to translate the works of Silas Flannery. In reality, however, Marana may be translating other books instead or perhaps inventing new books from scratch for the translations he is hired to do. Marana is a mysterious figure that the Reader hears a lot about—he’s always at the center of conspiracies and travels around the world to avoid being found. Marana also has an unusual relationship with Ludmilla, at one point conducting his work out of her house, which causes the Reader to become jealous. Many aspects of Marana’s character are deliberately unknown or confusing—in the letters that he writes to his publisher Mr. Cavedagna, he seems to break the flow of time and refer to events that happen in the future. Marana represents the difficulties of translation and how it is a mysterious process where an author typically has to trust the translator not to print something totally false. Like many other characters, Marana raises questions about the role of the author, showing how forces of chaos like Marana can change the content and meaning of a book on its way from the author to a reader.
Ermes Marana Quotes in If on a winter’s night a traveler
The If on a winter’s night a traveler quotes below are all either spoken by Ermes Marana or refer to Ermes Marana. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 6 Quotes
Ermes Marana appears to you as a serpent who injects his malice into the paradise of reading.
This quote describes the Reader’s reaction to first hearing about Ermes Marana, a translator whom the Reader learns about in the publishing house he visits and who seems to have an unusual life full of conspiracy and mystery. Marana has a reputation as a counterfeiter, claiming to translate books but in fact replacing them with translations of totally unrelated books. While the Reader seems to be interested in Marana, unable to stop reading his letters, ultimately the Reader finds Marana disturbing.
By raising the idea that a translation could be an unfaithful copy of the original, Marana destroys the Reader’s notion of a book as an act of communication between an author and a reader. Although Marana represents an extreme case, he illustrates how in general, translation can be a tricky job, and even a faithful translator may nevertheless introduce some changes into a book. By refusing to remain ignorant about the book-making process, the Reader, like Ludmilla, finds himself falling down a rabbit hole of questions that make him doubt everything he knows about reading. This reinforces the novel’s broader argument about how the truth can be elusive and fragmented.
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Chapter 8 Quotes
The Koran is the holy book about whose compositional process we know most. There were at least two mediations between the whole and the book: Mohammed listened to the word of Allah and dictated, in his turn, to his scribes. Once—the biographers of the Prophet tell us— while dictating to the scribe Abdullah, Mohammed left a sentence half finished. The scribe, instinctively, suggested the conclusion. Absently, the Prophet accepted as the divine word what Abdullah had said. This scandalized the scribe, who abandoned the Prophet and lost his faith.
He was wrong… The scribe’s collaboration was necessary to Allah, once he had decided to express himself in a written text.
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Ermes Marana Character Timeline in If on a winter’s night a traveler
The timeline below shows where the character Ermes Marana appears in If on a winter’s night a traveler. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5
...learn that Without fear of wind or vertigo was translated by a young man named Ermes Marana , who claimed to know Cimbrian but in fact didn’t know a word. It turns...
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...you don’t think it has any relation to any of the previous books you’ve read. Ermes Marana wrote Mr. Cavedagna a note defending his fraud, saying that the author’s name on a...
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Chapter 6
...isn’t sure where it is. He agrees, though, to send you the rest of his Ermes Marana files from the archives. Marana, writing from a remote village in South America, has sent...
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More letters from Ermes Marana come from around the world and describe his work on translating Silas Flannery’s In a...
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Ermes Marana ’s letters reveal that he gets caught up in webs of conspiracies around the world,...
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You continue to read Ermes Marana ’s letters and see more mysterious female figures like the Sultana, often with some connection...
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Ermes Marana has founded an organization that breaks into two sects, the “enlightened” followers of the Archangel...
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Chapter 7
...a table. You see that in the typewriter is a sheet that says, “Translation by Ermes Marana .” You think back to how all the women you read about in the letters...
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...the book you found is not the one you expected after all. Ludmilla explains that Ermes Marana always liked to play tricks on Ludmilla and make things false, partly because he was...
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Chapter 8
...of him is intrigued and perhaps even flattered. He learns that his translator’s name is Ermes Marana .
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Ermes Marana explains to the narrator that he currently lives in Japan. He gets off track talking...
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...read, and the narrator initially thinks that she’s attacking Lotaria, but in fact, she’s criticizing Ermes Marana . The narrator asks if he’s what Ludmilla expected, and she says yes. She wishes...
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...apocrypha (works that are hidden or falsely attributed) and how he’d like to collaborate with Ermes Marana to make some apocrypha, but he doesn’t know where to find him. Ludmilla will tell...
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The Reader tells the narrator that he knows who’s behind all the fakes: Ermes Marana . The narrator tells the Reader to do something about it himself, and the Reader...
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Chapter 10
...outside of work. You bring up the conspiracy about apocrypha you’ve been hearing about (involving Ermes Marana ). Arkadian Porphyrich is familiar with it, but he and his team have never been...
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