Word: rabassa
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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...
...course, no translator of the classics has a guarantee of exclusivity: in the 20 years since Walter Arndt won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his masterly version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, three publishers have brought out new translations of the same poem. Rabassa, who expects that his version of One Hundred Years of Solitude will ultimately be supplanted, believes the development is inevitable: "If you read Cervantes in Spanish today, he sounds relatively modern, but the translations of Don Quixote made by Cervantes' contemporaries seem terribly archaic." This variety of renditions has some advantages; each new translation...