Word: englishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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After the war, Rabassa earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. at Columbia University and then joined the faculty. He helped edit Odyssey Review, a magazine that published new literature from two European and two Latin American nations each year. Trouble was, English translations of many Spanish and Portuguese works were either nonexistent or inadequate. So Rabassa tried his hand, and the rest is literary history...
Still, to have captured such vibrancy in another language is a major accomplishment. Rabassa attributes his success, paradoxically, to his lifelong devotion to English and its literature: he is a dedicated Joycean and enjoys punning on the master's name ("Shame's Choice"). Despite his fluency in a number of tongues, Rabassa feels most comfortable moving from other languages toward English. "I could take a novel written in the U.S. and turn it into Spanish," he says, "but the result would be terribly flat. My passive vocabulary in Spanish would not be up to the task." Fortunately, as millions...
...many of you guys think I'm smarter than you?" he asks. Half the wards raise their hands. "I ain't smarter than anyone here, man," says Olmos, suddenly injecting street slang into his normally impeccable English. "I may have developed my brain a little more in high school, but I think we're pretty equal. I grew up in East L.A., just a few miles from here. You might say I was lucky. And I was. But I made a choice. I chose to start acting. I didn't come out of my mother's womb saying...
Olmos was right on the wavelength of "El Pachuco," the strutting, posing, super-macho narrator and mordant conscience of the story. "I spoke in calo, street jive from the streets of East L.A. -- a mix of Spanish, English and Gypsy," he says. "They asked me if I could dance, and I hit a perfect set of splits, turning the brim of my hat as I came up." He got the part...
...done this before, but always in Spanish. Nothing But the Truth is his first record in English, and, with collaboration from the likes of Elvis Costello, Sting and, most formidably, Lou Reed, he has fashioned eleven songs that range wide and pierce deep, all sharing a similar theme. "Violence is love gone crazy" is the way he puts it, with the same snazzy elan and offhand humor that make him such an affable and adept screen actor. He seems easy with it all: sweeping rock, laid-back jazz, Latin-inflected pop. Recently he reflected on the album on a film...