Word: rabassa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Foremost among the couriers from the Spanish and Portuguese is Rabassa, 62, who has spent the past two decades bringing Latin American literature north to the U.S. The authors he has translated constitute a pantheon of Hispanic letters: Garcia Márquez (Colombia), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), José Lezama Lima (Cuba), Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico), Vinicius de Moraes (Brazil...
...Despite Rabassa's attachment to Latin America, he prefers to live in an English-speaking environment. Born of a Cuban father and an American mother, he has spent most of his life in the North eastern U.S. He did go to Brazil for 18 months on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in the mid-1960s, but that was long enough...
...could become so Brazilianized, you couldn't express yourself in English," he decided. Nowadays, Rabassa works on the sun porch or in the kitchen of his Long Island home, producing a first version "as fast as I can type." He then carefully revises his draft, penciling in queries for the author...
...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...
...Neruda and Gabriela Mistral, both of whom won Nobel Prizes. But in the 1960s, North America began to encounter the names of novelists and essayists who would be associated with El Boom. The term suggested the sudden discovery of Latin American talent rather than its slow growth. Says Gregory Rabassa, the distinguished translator of many Hispanic writers: "El Boom is not quite right. I would prefer something a little stuffier, like fomento." The word means a gradual development...