Gregory Rabassa

Translator

• Born: March 9, 1922
• Birthplace: Yonkers, New York

American literary translator and critic

Rabassa, an American who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, has translated sixty works of fiction by forty writers in a dozen countries, including such Latin American authors as Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado.

Areas of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Gregory Rabassa was born in 1922 in Yonkers, New York, to a Cuban sugar broker, Miguel Rabassa, and his American wife, Clara MacFarland Rabassa, a native of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. He was the second of three sons and the brother of Jerome and Bob. When their father’s sugar job went sour, the family lost its large home on Park Hill in Yonkers, one of its two Cadillacs, and Charlie the chauffeur. Dispossessed though he was, Miguel “Mike” Rabassa was able to hang onto his thousand-acre farm in Hanover, New Hampshire, where Gregory and his brothers were raised.

Fortunately for Gregory, the linguist-to-be, both parents were “word” persons. “As a foreigner and especially as a Cuban, my father not only had become fluent in English but would fool around with it as only someone with an outside vantage could,” Rabassa recalled in his memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Discontents (2005). “My mother had brought with her the lingo of ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ in Manhattan, and also her mother’s colorful parlance . . . mainly from an older New York.” With all the diverse mannerisms of speech that infiltrated his consciousness, young Gregory developed an ear for sounds. Curiously, he did not pick up much Spanish at home, most likely because his father spoke English, except when he and a Cuban friend crossed paths. His father’s most illustrious friend was artist José Clemente Orozco, who would visit the family for some arroz con pollo when he was painting his murals in the reserve reading room of the Dartmouth College library.

Rabassa began his formal language training in high school with classes in Latin and French, the only foreign languages that were offered. At Dartmouth College, he switched majors from chemistry and physics to Romance languages, starting to learn Spanish and continuing to learn French. His first professor of Portuguese had picked up the language early from fishermen in his native Nantucket, Massachusetts.

During World War II, Rabassa signed up as a volunteer with the Army’s Enlisted Reserve Corps assigned to the Office of Strategic Services, the agency charged with obtaining information about Japan, Germany, and Italy and sabotaging these nations’ war potential and morale. Rabassa eventually was sent to Algiers as a cryptographer, a type of work related to translation because in decoding messages into clear text the cryptographer has to paraphrase the messages in order to disguise the easily broken transposition ciphers.

Rabassa completed his M.A. degree at Columbia University in 1947, writing his thesis on “The Poetry of Miguel de Unamuno.” He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1954 with a dissertation on “The Negro in Brazilian Fiction Since 1888.” After twenty-two years as a lecturer and associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia, he left this university in 1968 for Queens College, City University of New York, where he became the distinguished professor of Romance languages and comparative literature. He held that post until his retirement in 2008.

Life’s Work

Rabassa’s career as a translator arose from his work at Odyssey Review. In 1960, he agreed to be the associate editor of this new literary journal, which was located at Columbia University, where he was then teaching. As associate editor, he was asked to help compile literary works for an issue on literature in translation. In 1963, he received a call from Sara Blackburn, an editor at Pantheon, who asked him to translate a new novel by a young Argentine writer, Julio Cortázar. The novel was Rayuela (1963). Although Rabassa was unfamiliar with Cortázar’s oeuvre, he signed a contract and translated the novel as Hopscotch (1966). Hopscotch contains instructions on how to read the novel in two versions. Aware of this, Rabassa later realized that he had provided a third reading of the novel by translating it from the first page to the last. Reading the complete novel only as he translated it—“following my instincts by letting the words lead the way”—became a practice he would repeat in most of his efforts. Hopscotch won Rabassa the 1967 National Book Award for translation and led to his enduring friendship with Cortázar, who would recommend him to fellow writer Gabriel García Márquez.

Rabassa departed from his usual practice for what has proved to be his most famous translation—that of Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970). “Because everyone was talking about it,” he said he read the novel through before taking on its translation. A twelve-page chapter in Rabassa’s memoir proves how inexact yet demanding literary translation can be. For Rabassa, the problems with Cien años de soledad began with the title. Cien (one hundred) in Spanish bears no article, while its English equivalent must be expressed as “one hundred” or “a hundred.” He explained that, “I viewed the extent of time involved as something quite specific, as in a prophecy, something definite, a countdown, not just any old one hundred years . . . I am [still] convinced that Gabo [García Márquez] meant it in the sense of one as this is closer to the feel of the novel. There was no cavil on his part.” The word soledad (solitude) is similarly ambiguous, for it carries the meaning of its English kin—“solitude”—but also the sense of loneliness, thus bearing both the positive and the negative feelings associated with aloneness. Rabassa said, “I went for solitude because it’s a touch more inclusive, also carrying the germ of loneliness.” One Hundred Years of Solitude, his best-known translation, is virtually Rabassa’s only instance in which he read a novel through in the original and then rewrote it in English. In a deft bit of self-justification, he concluded that being acquainted with Cien años prior to translating it may have been providential.

Despite these difficulties, García Márquez said that he preferred Rabassa’s English version to his own original Spanish text, adding that the plot “all came together in his mind [beforehand] and he just sat down and strung the words needed to express it.” Thus, Rabassa consoles himself by declaring that he “simply translated in a way close to the way the book was composed.”

In making a work by Cortázar his first translation, Rabassa assumed the proper frame of mind to take on subsequent projects. Spanish and Latino literary surrealism, from Miguel de Cervantes’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615; The History of the Valorous and Wittie Knight-Errant, Don Quixote of the Mancha, 1612-1620; better known as Don Quixote de la Mancha), to Hopscotch more than 350 years later, seem to Rabassa to be unfinished. Successive translations cannot help but provide new readings and new endings. “In the sense or nonsense of it, every translation I have done since Hopscotch has in some way or another been its continuation,” he has said. Near the end of Rabassa’s memoir, in discussing Oswaldo Franca, Jr., a little-known Brazilian writer, and his novel O Homem de Macacão (1972; The Man in the Monkey Suit, 1986), Rabasso regrets that by letting a flat-talking auto mechanic narrate in first-person voice the story of ordinary people, Franca is unlikely to attract American readers. “It could be that for foreign books to be successful here there has to be some scent of the exotic or strange. . . . What if the mechanic had been the narrator of [F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel] The Great Gatsby.”

Rabassa maintains that, “The translator must always listen to the characters’ voices as they come over into English and not his or her voices as they are being translated.” He wonders what writer Fyodor Dostoevski would have sounded like had he walked the streets of Rio de Janeiro rather than those of St. Petersburg.

Since Rabassa’s auspicious debut as winner of the National Book Award for the translation of Hopscotch and the PEN American Center Translation Prize in 1977 for his English translation of García Márquez’s El otoño del patriarca (1975; Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), he has received more formal recognition than any translator before him. Among Rabassa's other honors are a 1988 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1989 American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Prize, a 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2006 National Medal of Arts, and an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth in 2014.

In addition to his award-winning translations of fiction, Rabassa has made works of literary criticism of Brazilian literature accessible to American audiences. He has also contributed to such well-known US publications as the New Yorker and the New York Times. Rabassa and his wife, Clementine, reside in New York City.

Significance

Whatever the meaning of the much debated term “Magical Realism,” which began to be heard in the 1960’s with the booming popularity of García Márquez, Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Amado, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and at least forty other Latin American writers of fiction, this literary style came at a time when postmodernists were proclaiming the death of narrative. However, the developing world to the south of the United States was just beginning to discover that it had its own tales to tell. The primary entry for North American readers to these fresh narratives was forged by the translations of Gregory Rabassa.

Bibliography

Deresiewicz, William. New York Times Book Review, May 15, 2005, p.36.

Guzman, Maria Constance. Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2011. Print.

Hoeksema, Thomas, “The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa.” Translation Review 1 (1978).

Rabassa, Gregory, If This Be Treason: Translations and Its Discontents, a Memoir. New York: New Directions, 2005.

Rabassa, Gregory. "The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Rabassa." Interview by Susan Bernofsky. Rumpus. Rumpus, 19 Sept. 2013. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.