Parrot 3.6 Release Quotation Contest Is Over

The release quotation contest is over. We received four submissions, each of which was correct. In order of receipt, they were from:

  1. Ville Koskinen
  2. Lucas Buchala
  3. Daniel S.
  4. Javier M. Mora

Each of the four submissions appears to have met the do-not-use-the-Internet condition for researching the answer. In fact, each of the four appear to have gotten the answer the old-fashioned way:

They remembered it!

That is, each had read the book in which the quotation originally appeared. Each pieced together enough clues from the quotation to identify the source. What is particularly striking, however, is that our four submitters originally read the source in (as far as I can tell) three different languages[1] -- two of which were not the language in which the quotation appeared in the contest and none of which was English! (Did somebody say something about "aimed at all dynamic languages"?)

The quotation is from the first chapter of Cien años de soledad, Gabriel García Márquez's 1967 masterwork about ... memory.


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

The quotation contains the first two instances of the word pájaro or parrot. However, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gregory Rabassa's English translation, simply translates this as bird. Our submitters had read this book in English, Portuguese or Spanish.

Ville Koskinen, as first correct responder, will win the prize -- once we figure out what that is. Honorable mention to Lucas Buchala, who provided a photo of a Portuguese edition of the source taken in front of this very web page!

[1] Finnish, Portuguese and Spanish