{"id":1299,"date":"2014-04-24T18:44:24","date_gmt":"2014-04-24T23:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/?p=1299"},"modified":"2020-04-07T14:45:07","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T18:45:07","slug":"100-years-of-solitude-translator-speaks-for-first-time-about-garcia-marquezs-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/100-years-of-solitude-translator-speaks-for-first-time-about-garcia-marquezs-death\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018100 Years Of Solitude\u2019 Translator Speaks For First Time About Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Death"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Damarys Oca\u00f1a Perez \/ Fox News Latino<\/a><\/p>\n

They exchanged just a few letters and met just once\u2014for drinks at a Manhattan hotel one time that Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez was passing through town.<\/p>\n

But Gregory Rabassa\u2019s connection to the revered Colombian author, who died on April 17 at age 87, was nevertheless intimate, indelible\u2014and unique: He is the translator who introduced the English-speaking world to the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was universal,\u201d Rabassa, who is Cuban-American, told Fox News Latino in his first interview since Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez’s death.<\/p>\n

Rabassa, who recently turned 92, worked as a cryptologist during World War II\u2014an occupation that gave him the opportunity to rub shoulders with presidents and Hollywood stars. After the war, he became a literature professor at Columbia University and an award-winning translator of Latin American and Spanish works.<\/p>\n

The Argentinian author Julio Cort\u00e1zar, whose work Rabassa had translated, recommended him so highly that \u201cGabo\u201d\u2014as Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez was known\u2014agreed to wait for Rabassa to clear up his schedule before making his English-language debut.<\/p>\n

Rabassa, who had read \u201c100 Years of Solitude\u201d in Spanish and had been enchanted by its lyrical language and epic scope, dug in to the task of bringing it alive to a new audience, starting with the book\u2019s evocative first line, which jumps and twists in time and tone and took four tries to get right. (\u00abMany years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buend\u00eda was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.\u00bb)<\/p>\n

\u201cHis imagination was working, working,\u201d Rabassa said. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t just writing, he was creating mythology, like the ancient tales of the Greeks and the Romans.\u201d<\/p>\n

Critics who say that Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s book with its use of magic realism is out of touch with modern Latin America, \u201caren\u2019t very bright,\u201d Rabassa said. \u201cWe\u2019ve got enough old, straight, dry, gray realism. This is art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez lavished the translator with similar praise. \u201cHe told me that the translation was even better than the original,\u201d recalled Rabassa.<\/p>\n

Rabassa went on to translate a handful of Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s other books\u2014\u201cThe Autumn of the Patriarch,\u201d \u201cChronicle of a Death Foretold,\u201d \u201cLeaf Storm\u201d and \u201cInnocent Erendira and Other Stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

The two kept in touch sporadically over the years but saw each other only one time, when they talked about friends, literature and memories while drinking together in New York. \u201cHe lived in Mexico and I in New York and neither of us liked to travel much,\u201d Rabassa said.<\/p>\n

Born in Yonkers, N.Y., Rabassa called himself an \u201caccidental translator\u201d who showed a childhood gift for picking up languages. That would later serve him well as a cryptologist.<\/p>\n

With his knowledge of Russian, Portuguese, Italian, French and German\u2014\u201cI also like to read Egyptian hieroglyphics,\u201d Rabassa added with a laugh\u2014he helped interrogate high-value prisoners, including Nazi generals, in north Africa and Italy.<\/p>\n

Once, in the presence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the White House, he decoded an intercepted German message, which Rabassa and his superior officer determined to be fake disinformation and burned it on the spot.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a memory that is less cloak-and-dagger and more Hollywood glamour that still charms him: He once danced with actress Marlene Dietrich.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe did a lot of work for the OSS, broadcasting and other things, and we had a party in Algiers,\u201d Rabassa recalled. \u201cI was sitting there, gawking at her googly-eyed, and she walked by me and said, \u2018Sergeant, you\u2019re not dancing.\u2019 She pulled me on to the floor, and that was that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the war, Rabassa earned his graduate degree from Columbia and taught there for many years before moving on to Queens College, retiring in 2008 after a 60-year academic career.<\/p>\n

Rabassa fell into translation while working at a literary magazine that focused on Latin American writing. He went on to translate from Spanish and Portuguese the works of major writers including future Nobelists Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, as well as Jose Lezama Lima, Jorge Amado and Cort\u00e1zar.<\/p>\n

In 1966, Rabassa received the 1966 National Book Award for translation for his work on Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s labyrinthine novel, \u201cRayuela,\u201d which was published in English as \u201cHopscotch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rabassa also wrote a 2005 memoir, \u201cIf This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents,\u201d which was awarded the National Medal of Arts.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel I\u2019ve done something good,\u201d Rabassa understated. \u201cLike a painter who paints a picture that pleases people.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of the authors Rabassa worked with shone brighter than Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. Rabassa had been preparing mentally for the author’s death for a while. \u201cI knew he was very sick and was surprised that he lasted this long,\u201d he said. \u201cIn a sense, we were all waiting for that moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when Rabassa picked up the New York Times on April 18 and saw Gabo\u2019s picture on the front page along with an obituary, he understood that some lives are immortal.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe will be remembered as long as there are people in the world who are interested in great literature,\u201d Rabassa said. \u201cHopefully, that will be forever.\u201d<\/p>\n

Damarys Oca\u00f1a Perez is an independent writer and editor based in New York. Follow her on Twitter: @DamarysOP<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Damarys Oca\u00f1a Perez \/ Fox News Latino They exchanged just a few letters and met just once\u2014for drinks at a Manhattan hotel one time […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":2448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-en-los-medios"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2449,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1299\/revisions\/2449"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conalti.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}