Word: rabassa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Gregory Rabassa, the eminent translator and authority on Spanish literature, says Cela "kept the Spanish novel alive during those awful years." That period, of course, encompasses the Spanish Civil War and the wrenching adjustments afterward to the Franco dictatorship. Cela, raised in Madrid by his Spanish father and English mother, was a university student in 1936 when the war erupted. He joined what readers of Hemingway or Orwell will recognize as the wrong side, taking up arms with Franco against the Republic. He continued his education in conflict, hearing the oxymoronic battle cry of some of his fellow soldiers: Viva...
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...
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...
...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...
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...