Translator helped spark boom in Latin American fiction
Scholar’s work introduced English-speaking readers to Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa
Gregory Rabassa, whose masterly English-language translations of the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and other writers helped propel the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s into an international phenomenon, died June 13, in Branford, Conn. He was 94.
Rabassa was teaching Spanish and Portuguese literature in New York when he was asked by a publisher to translate a 1963 novel by the Argentine writer Julio Cortazar.
In 1966, Cortazar’s Rayuela was published in English as Hopscotch, and worldwide interest in Latin American fiction began to spread.
Cortazar recommended Rabassa to a friend, Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published in Spanish in 1967. Three years later, Rabassa produced an English-language version so skilful that Garcia Marquez said he preferred it to the original.
The novel, which takes place near the author’s birthplace on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, helped define a style of writing called magic realism and became recognized as a towering masterpiece of 20th-century literature, selling more than 50 million copies.
The tone of One Hundred Years of Solitude — blending the mythic and the mundane — was established in its opening sentence: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
In a 2005 memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Rabassa described the nuanced choices that make up the translator’s art. He used “remember” instead of “recall” in the opening sentence, he wrote, “because I feel that it conveys a deeper memory.”
He described the afternoon as “distant” instead of “remote” because he didn’t want to conjure “such inappropriate things as remote control and robots. Also, I like ‘distant’ when used with time. I think Dr. Einstein would have approved.”
But the thorniest problem in the first sentence, Rabassa wrote, came in the phrase “to discover ice.” The Spanish verb conocer means “to know” and “just won’t do in English. It implies, ‘How do you do, ice?’ It could be ‘to experience ice.’ The first is foolish, the second is silly. When you get to know something for the first time, you’ve discovered it.”
Garcia Marquez called Rabassa “the best Latin American writer in the English language.”
Over the course of his career, Rabassa translated about 60 literary works from Spanish and Portuguese, including books by Brazilian authors Jorge Amado and Clarice Lispector and by four Spanish-language Nobel laureates: Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa from Peru, Octavio Paz from Mexico and Miguel Angel Asturias from Guatemala.
When translating a book, Rabassa seldom read it in advance: he simply turned to page 1 and began to compose the English-language version, without knowing how the plot would turn out. “I used the excuse that it gave the translation the freshness that a first reading would have,” he wrote in his memoir. “I have put forth this explanation so many times that I have come to believe it, loath as I am to confess that I was just too lazy to read the book twice.”
Born in New York to a Cuban-born father and a mother of English and Scottish ancestry, Rabassa studied French and Latin in high school. At Dartmouth College, he “began collecting languages,” including Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and German. As a cryptographer during the Second World War, he was stationed in North Africa and Italy, where he learned Italian.
The primary aim of any translator, Rabassa believed, was to convey the author’s personality and to capture the imagination and energy of the writing, while making it sound natural and idiomatic in the second language. “That’s what a good translation is,” he said in 2004. “You have to think if Garcia Marquez had been born speaking English, that’s how a translation should sound.”