Word: cortazar
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...novel called Cien Aos de Soledad was published in Buenos Aires and began winning international acclaim for a Colombian journalist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet nearly three years elapsed before One Hundred Years of Solitude made its way into English. The reason for the delay? Argentine Author Julio Cortazar, whose novel Rayuela had become a critical success in the U.S. as Hopscotch, offered Garcia Marquez a piece of advice based on his own happy experience: Get your book translated by Professor Gregory Rabassa of New York City. As it happened, Garcia Marquez had to wait a while; Rabassa was busy...
...been steadily busy ever since. During the past two decades, Rabassa, 66, has translated more than 30 books from the original Spanish or Portuguese. He has given English-speaking readers access to a formidable roster of Latin American authors, including Cortazar, Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Amado and Octavio Paz. His work has won an array of awards, including, this past May, a $10,000 prize from the Wheatland Foundation for his "notable contribution to international literary exchange." Along the way, Rabassa earned the admiration of writers who have gained new audiences through his translations. Garcia Marquez has called...
Since he won a National Book Award for his translation of Cortazar's Hopscotch in 1967, Rabassa has juggled two careers. He remains a dedicated teacher and scholar, having left Columbia some 20 years ago to become a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York. And he has, of course, translated incessantly. "I could have done more if I had given up teaching," he says, "but I used spare time and weekends. And there are always the summers...
PUIG IS not the magician with words that some of his contemporaries are; though perhaps partly the fault of the translator, his prose does not roll forward with the colorful sweep of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, does not maintain the lively, fresh tone of Julio Cortazar. Finally Pubis Angelical is not successful when considered as a whole. The three interwoven parts of the narrative do not converge to a single story; they are not unified by a definite connection between the characters, and their similarities do not, in the end, seem very convincing. The optimistic, peaceful conclusion of the novel...
Most of his quandaries arise from Latin American writers' love of verbal play. In A Manual for Manuel, Cortazar characterizes different types of secret policemen in a string of richly suggestive alliterative words, hormigon, hormigucho, etc. In English, a literal translation (big ant, big clumsy ant) would have been ungainly. Rabassa's solution: dominant, sycophant, miscreant...