Gregory Rabassa: Master Of The Translating Art

Every so often, Gregory Rabassa pays his respects to St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators, by visiting the Frick Collection in Manhattan to see the El Greco portrait. The saint, painted from an obviously Spanish model, is stern looking and reminds Mr. Rabassa of a professor he had many years ago at Columbia University - "a mean old son of a bitch."

St. Jerome's translation of the Old and New Testaments from Latin had been the sole source of all Catholic Bibles in English for more than 15 centuries. His faithful visitor, Mr. Rabassa, is one of the major translators of Spanish and Portuguese, and he has crafted into English some of the finest literature to come out of Latin America in this century.

Abiding Error

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Amado, Jose Lezama Lima, and others have achieved enormous popularity across the United States and in other English-speaking countries in part due to Mr. Rabassa's work over the last 30 years.

But, any comparison to St. Jerome must end there. The monk had such a biting humor that other monks found him difficult to get along with, and his relationship to St. Paula, who trailed after him everywhere, was a scandal. And he is associated with a terrible and enduring professional error.

Ancient Hebrew lacks vowels and, as the story goes, the monk mistook the group of consonants meaning "halo" for "horns," thereby giving the prophet Moses a false image as a cuckold, which was preserved forever by Michelangelo.

Mr. Rabassa, on the other hand, is modest, soft spoken, and accommodating. His career has provided him with many distinguished friends and produced a long list of awards and honors.

In 1967, he won the National Book Award for Translation for Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch." His translations of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Autumn of the Patriarch," Gabriel Garcia Marquez's monumental best-sellers, were finalists in that competition in 1971 and 1977, the same year he received the PEN American Center's first prize for "Autumn."

The list of professional honors goes on, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN medal for translation, an honorary doctorate from Dartmouth College, a doctorate in Portuguese from Columbia University, the Alexander Gode medal from the American Translators Association, and so on.

Goal: Invisibility

Unlike other translators, who often complain that they never garner the recognition achieved by the authors whose works they translate, Mr. Rabassa considers being in the background exactly where a translator belongs.

"The highest praise one can give is to say something doesn't read like a translation. The idea is to be invisible, but translators do tend to whine," he said.

The PEN Club made enough noise so that the Library of Congress recently agreed to list translators along with authors, and PEN continues to send a letter to any book reviewer who neglects the translator.

Now 75, Mr. Rabassa spent two years in Brazil on a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and has been all over Europe and Latin American for pleasure and work. During an interview last week at his simple cottage in Hampton Bays, however, he said he was losing the urge to travel.

Limited Languages

"Portugal was the last great place to travel, but it's been McDonaldized too. The rock-and-roll music has pushed out the fado," he said.

He talked too about his father, who was born in Cuba and came to New York at the turn of the century to escape his own father, a tyrant of Catalan descent. The elder Mr. Rabassa worked as a sugar broker, "a logical occupation for a Cuban," but did not speak Spanish at home.

"The only time I heard Spanish was when he cut his finger, or when he counted. He was perfectly fluent but would get balled up over numbers."

At Dartmouth, Mr. Rabassa studied Romance languages, with emphasis on Spanish and Portuguese. Rus sian was added to the curriculum when World War II began, and he studied a little of that too. But, just six points short of a degree, he joined the Army.

O.S.S. Decoder

He was attached to the Office of Strategic Services, serving for three years in Washington, North Africa, and Italy. Sent first to North Africa when it was thought Hitler would invade Spain, he ended up in Italy decoding messages sent from inside the Third Reich.

As early as January 1945, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, known as Smiling Albert, was secretly negotiating Germany's surrender. When he was transferred back inside Germany, the O.S.S. had to find a new contact. This was Karl Wolf, an S.S. general who was responsible for many atrocities but saved himself from hanging by taking over the talks.

Despite the espionage, Mr. Rabassa found the work mundane, the negotiations being "such a gradual thing." It was, though, his start as a translator..

First Work

After the war, Mr. Rabassa pursued a master's degree in Spanish at Columbia on the G.I. Bill. Dartmouth had awarded him a degree in absentia. "I figured I got three points for physical education in the military and three for modern European history in the O.S.S.," he explained. He switched to Portuguese for his doctorate.

While studying and teaching at Columbia, he and some colleagues started a magazine that highlighted new European and Latin American writers. One of them, Miguel Angel Asturias, later won the Nobel Prize.

Through the magazine, Mr. Rabassa came to the attention of Sarah Blackburn at Pantheon Press. She hired him to translate "Hopscotch," his first book assignment and his first contact with Julio Cortazar, who became a friend and the favorite among all the authors whose works he has handled.

Used Car Helped

Mr. Cortazar, a leftist in his native Argentina, was blacklisted by the State Department in the 1950s. A serendipitous connection between Mr. Rabassa and the Nixon Administration got him a visa, however, in time to attend an important conference of the Americas Society.

"I once bought a used car from Leonard Garment - the White House intellectual - and I was going with his old girlfriend. I called him and Cortazar never had any trouble from then on," laughed Mr. Rabassa, adding he was amused later to see George McGovern's campaign ads showing a photo of President Nixon and asking, "Would you buy a used car from this man?"

Mr. Cortazar, himself a translator before becoming one of Latin America's leading writers, did the university circuit in this country several times before he died in 1984. He was known for lending a hand to young writers and helping to attract much-needed money for translations.

"Hopscotch" and a short story called "Blow-Up" were later made into films.

Favorite Effort

In comparison, Mr. Rabassa found Mr. Marquez, now more famous by far, "withdrawn."

"He writes his ideas and opinions but doesn't like to appear in public," said Mr. Rabassa. They met the first time in New York about 15 years ago, when Mr. Marquez was himself supposedly blacklisted for his radical ideas. "He became a recluse, hanging out with only the high and mighty, like Fidel Castro. But never going into the streets."

Still, he admires Mr. Marquez's work enormously. He said "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was perhaps his favorite. "It was so well written that it translated itself, which speaks well of his style. His ideas may be baroque but his writing is classical," he said.

Mr. Rabassa struggled, on the other hand, with Jose Lezama Lima's baroque ideas and style, which contained invented words, strange meanings for common words, and impossibly complex syntax. "The English and the Spanish didn't match. I had to rearrange it all," he said.

Cold Eye

Although he said he appreciates the passion and romanticism of Latin literature he said he must, as a translator, "look at it with a cold eye." That eye, he added with a smile, "may be from my grandfather's cold Catalan blood. He did not have high regard for artists."

Describing the influence of linguistics on the field of translation, Mr. Rabassa said, "It doesn't seem they're talking about what I'm doing. It's like relating chemistry in our bodies to what we're doing," He moved his hands through the air. "It doesn't seem to be the same thing."

Instead, he argues, one often must find the spirit of the meaning rather than a word or phrase's precise counterpart. Such an approach helped him, he said, with Mr. Lima's elaborate language. Asked for an example, he said it was most easily described in relation to curses. Son of a bitch, for example, wouldn't go into Spanish, so it becomes hijo de puta, son of a whore.

Big Goat?

Likewise, Spanish speakers don't use "bastard," a fairly common expletive in English, while "cuckold" has no value in modern English. The sentiment is therefore best conveyed with cabron, which literally means "big goat." It works, though, ironically. The goat is a medieval symbol of masculinity, and the insult is the same as calling the village idiot Einstein, said Mr. Rabassa.

Now a professor at Queens College and the Graduate School of City University, Mr. Rabassa is working on a work of nonfiction, "The Brazilian People" by the late Darcy Ribeiro, an anthropologist and novelist who "writes like a novelist and translates easily."

Like the others, Mr. Ribeiro had, through the vagaries of South American politics, become something of an outcast.

Magic Realism

On the subject of magic realism, Mr. Rabassa noted that the author of "Seven Serpents and Seven Moons," Demetrio Aquilera-Malta, an Ecua dorian, wrote in the style as early as the 1930s. Although the Brazilians were credited with pioneering the genre, the term was coined by a critic to describe Kafka, he said.

Mr. Rabassa translated "Seven Serpents" in 1979 "as a labor of love," and then went looking for a publisher - "not generally a good idea." A Wall Street Journal profile of Mr. Rabassa, in which he talked about publishers being unwilling to spend money on translation, prompted one to finally come forward.

The Americas Society paid to turn "One Hundred Years of Solitude" into English but, even after it became an international success, Harper and Row declined to assume the cost, said Mr. Rabassa.

A Compliment

Most translating money now comes from university presses and, he added, from the Mobil Oil Corporation. He has only just finished this year's winner of Mobil's Pegasus Prize, "A God Strolling in the Evening Breeze" by Mario de Carvalho. Mobil is also paying to publish the novel, about Christianity coming to Roman Portugal.

Of the more than 35 books Mr. Rabassa has translated, he said he was most proud of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," not because of its success but because Mr. Marquez said he liked it better in English than Spanish.

Ever humble, though, the translator did not take the praise personally.

"I think that was meant more as a compliment to the English language," he said.