Word: latinized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
Translators do not ordinarily achieve such renown, and the wry, soft-spoken foreign-language professor seems bemused by his success in a career he never planned. "It was serendipity all the way," he says. Little in his childhood suggested he would someday become a bridge across Latin and Anglo cultures. The youngest of three sons of a Cuban father and an American mother, Rabassa grew up in and around New York City and seldom heard Spanish spoken about the house: "As a Cuban, my father was eager to adapt to his new environment." The Rabassas later moved to New Hampshire...
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...
Rabassa downplays his role of spreading the good words of Latin American writing. "The credit belongs to the writers, particularly Jorge Luis Borges and Garcia Marquez, who rediscovered Don Quixote. My theory is that Cervantes was the first magical realist. But then the British stole both the Spanish colonies and the Spanish novel. After that, a lot of Latin American literature merely aped European models. But life and the landscape in South America were always more vivid than conventional fiction could convey. Once writers began breaking the rules, their subjects came alive...
...sensibilidad. It refers to a quality of temperament easier to recognize than define, a spacious basket of subtleties: strength without roughness, pride tempered with humor, a hint of festival, a tinge of tragedy. Like the monolithic term Hispanic, it tends to blur the individual colors of each distinct Latin culture, and yet artists, designers, actors and authors from all corners of Latin culture resort to the word when others fail to capture just what is most infectious about a Latin sense of style...