If translators are the anonymous heroes of contemporary literature, its anonymous superhero is Gregory Rabassa.

The New York Times Book Review
Gregory Rabassa

Gregory Rabassa

Gregory Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, March 9, 1922. He grew up north of Hanover, NH, graduated from Dartmouth College, Class of 1944, Phi Beta Kappa, and got his MA, and PhD at Columbia University after serving as a U.S. Army, Infantry, Staff Sgt during World War II. One of Latin American literature’s most distinguished translators, Gregory Rabassa translated more than thirty novels from Spanish and Portuguese into English — including works by Jorge Amado, Miguel Angel Asturias, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Most notably, he translated Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Among his many awards, Gregory Rabassa was a Fulbright Fellow, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, PEN. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at Queens College/CUNY and The Graduate School/CUNY.

cover image of the book If This Be Treason

If This Be Treason

Gregory Rabassa’s influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected works in world literature. (García Márquez was known to say that the English translation of One Hundred Years was better than the Spanish original.) In If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Rabassa offers a coolheaded and humorous defense of translation, laying out his views on the translator’s art. Anecdotal and always illuminating, Rabassa traces his career from a boyhood on a New Hampshire farm, his school days “collecting” languages, the two and a half years he spent overseas during WWII, and his South American travels, until one day “I signed a contract to do my first translation of a long work [Cortázar’s Hopscotch] for a commercial publisher.” Additionally, Rabassa offers us his “rap sheet,” a consideration of the various authors and the over 40 works he has translated. This longawaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

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cover image of the book 62: A Model Kit

62: A Model Kit

by Julio Cortázar

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

First published in English in 1972 and long out of print, 62: A Model Kit is Julio Cortázar’s brilliant, intricate blueprint for life in the so-called “City.” As one of the main characters, the intellectual Juan, puts it: to one person the City might appear as Paris, to another it might be where one goes upon getting out of bed in Barcelona; to another it might appear as a beer hall in Oslo. This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, “seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!” It is the setting where the usual restraints of traditional novelistic order are discarded and the reader is taken on a daring and exciting new experience of life itself, The New York Times described 62: A Model Kit as “deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious.” Library Journal said 62: A Model Kit is “a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time.”

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If translators are the anonymous heroes of contemporary literature, its anonymous superhero is Gregory Rabassa.

The New York Times Book Review

Excellent literary entertainment. Read these pages while sipping a Brazilian caipirinha, and you’ll spend a fine and mellow evening.

Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

In this supple narrative, packed with erudition and yet leavened by Rabassa’s mordant, often self-effacing wit, less becomes more.

Newsweek

Widely considered one of the greatest practitioners of his craft.

The New York Times

If translators are the anonymous heroes of contemporary literature, its anonymous superhero is Gregory Rabassa.

The New York Times Book Review

The best Latin American writer in the English language.

Gabriel García Márquez

A fine summing-up by the translator who brought…Márquez and Julio Cortázar to the attention of English-speaking readers.

Kirkus Reviews
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