Translator was key gateway to Latin American literature
NEW YORK Gregory Rabassa, a translator of worldwide influence and esteem who helped introduce Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar and other Latin American authors to millions of Englishlanguage readers, has died.
A longtime professor at Queens College, Rabassa died June 12 at a hospice in Branford, Conn. He was 94 and died after a brief illness, said his daughter, Kate Rabassa.
Gregory Rabassa was an essential gateway to the 1960s Latin American “boom,” when such authors as Garcia Marquez, Cortazar and Mario Vargas Llosa became widely known internationally. He worked on the novel that helped start the boom, Cortazar’s Hopscotch, for which Rabassa won a National Book Award for translation. He also worked on the novel that defined the boom, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a monument of 20th-century literature. Garcia Marquez often praised Rabassa, saying he regarded the translation of Solitude as a work of art in its own right.
“He’s the godfather of us all,” said Edith Grossman, the acclaimed translator of Don Quixote and several Garcia Marquez books. “He’s the one who introduced Latin-American literature in a serious way to the English-speaking world.”
Rabassa’s other translations included Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and Jorge Amado’s Captains of the Sand.
In 2001, Rabassa received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center for contributions to Hispanic literature. He was presented a National Medal of Arts in 2006 for translations that “continue to enhance our cultural understanding and enrich our lives.”
Language was a lifelong fascination for Rabassa, whose father was Cuban and mother from New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. He was born March 9 in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1922, and raised on a farm in Hanover, N.H., near Dartmouth College, where Rabassa majored in romance languages. Fitting for the future translator, he served as a cryptographer during the Second World War, later joking that in deciphering secret messages it was his job to change English into English.
After the war, Rabassa studied Spanish and Portuguese as a graduate student at Columbia University and translated Spanish- and Portuguese-language works for the magazine Odyssey. He broke into mainstream publishing in the 1960s when an editor at Pantheon Books asked him to translate Salazar’s Hopscotch, a stream-of-consciousness novel that had the Spanish title Rayuela.
Around the same time Hopscotch won the U.S. National Book Award, in 1967, Garcia Marquez was finishing his masterpiece of magical realism, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Rabassa’s reputation was so high that Garcia Marquez waited three years for the English version so the translator’s schedule could clear.
“A good translation is always a re-creation in another language. That’s why I have such great admiration for Gregory Rabassa,” the Colombian author told The Paris Review in 1981. “My books have been translated into 21 languages and Rabassa is the only translator who has never asked for something to be clarified so he can put a footnote in. I think that my work has been completely re-created in English.”