Bridge Over Cultures

By Paul Gray

In 1967 a novel called Cien Aos de Soledad was published in Buenos Aires and began winning international acclaim for a Colombian journalist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Yet nearly three years elapsed before One Hundred Years of Solitude made its way into English. The reason for the delay? Argentine Author Julio Cortazar, whose novel Rayuela had become a critical success in the U.S. as Hopscotch, offered Garcia Marquez a piece of advice based on his own happy experience: Get your book translated by Professor Gregory Rabassa of New York City. As it happened, Garcia Marquez had to wait a while; Rabassa was busy.

He has 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 him the "best Latin American writer in the English language."

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, where Gregory attended high school, but it was only at Dartmouth College that he took up the study of Spanish in earnest. During World War II, the Ivy Leaguer served in North Africa and Italy with the Office of Strategic Services. Among his jobs were receiving and reworking secret military codes: "My first experience of translation." His European service did not lead him to Spain. "If Hitler had invaded there," he says, "my OSS team would almost certainly have gone in. But he didn't, so we went to Italy instead." That missed opportunity has endured. The pre- eminent translator of the Spanish language has never been to Spain.

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."

The professor has traveled extensively in South America, and has paid not one but two visits to the ancient Incan site of Machu Picchu in Peru. "I tell my friends," he laughs, "that I've made the hajj twice." He has also carefully observed the literary landscape, looking for new writers to translate. "It is easier to get published down there than it is in the U.S.," he says, "but harder to make money at it. There are many little magazines, and they are widely read. It's as if the Kenyon Review had The New Yorker's circulation. But the fees paid to contributors are nothing like The New Yorker's."

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 of readers have discovered, there is nothing passive about Rabassa's English or flat about the literature to which he has given a new voice.