If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

by Gregory Rabassa

Overview

This long-awaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

A Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the Year for 2005.

Gregory Rabassa's influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected works in world literature. (Garcia Marquez 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 cool- headed 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 [Cortazar'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 long-awaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811216654
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/17/2006
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016) was the recipient of multiple prizes including a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center for contributions to Hispanic literature and a National Medal of Arts. He was the translator of One Hundred Years of Solitude, among other classic works.

Editorial Reviews

"An insider's view that is available nowhere else, and everyone, neophytes as well as past or present Spanish majors, can profit from it."

The LA Times Book Review

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

Newsweek

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

The Washington Post - Michael Dirda

"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

"Widely considered one of the greatest practitioners of his craft."

The New York Times

As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer put it, if we understand at all, we understand differently. And if we understand the writers of the Boom, we have Rabassa to thank. The act of translation neither we nor he will ever understand.
— The New York Times

William Deresiewicz

In If This Be Treason Rabassa is anything but hard and brittle. He goes in every direction, finding his life marked by serendipity, his best translations based on instinct and his taste that of an old-fashioned reader -- one of those, he says, "who still like to turn pages." Happily, Rabassa continues to translate new work, often for small presses, even in his eighties. All of us "who still like to turn pages" should be grateful.
— The Washington Post

Michael Dirda

Without Rabassa (romance languages & comparative literature, Queens Coll.), few English speakers would have encountered the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Amado, and numerous other Spanish- and Portuguese-language writers. Rabassa's translations of these writings have made him one of the leading translators of Latin American literature. So why call translation treason? He addresses that question in Part 1, "The Onset of Perfidy," with reflections on the nuances of language, his linguistic background (he is fluent in five languages), and his surprising methods of translation-he begins while reading the text the first time. Ironically, this technique allows him to escape "literary treason" by remaining true to the writer's narrative and intent. In Part 2, "The Bill of Particulars," he devotes each chapter to an author-30 in all-whose works he has translated into English, describing his relationship with that author and the background of the work. This is certainly an academic work, even a bit dry at times, but quite suitable for college libraries. Yet clarity and anecdotes render it engrossing and accessible to many public library patrons as well.-Nedra Crowe-Evers, Sonoma Cty. Lib., CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A fine summing-up by the translator who brought such notable Latin American authors as Gabriel Garc'a Marquez and Julio Cortazar to the attention of English-speaking readers. In three parts, Rabassa surveys his long, distinguished career in translation. The first essay, "The Many Faces of Treason," treats the "varieties of betrayal" inherent in his art: betrayal of the word (can stone ever be truly equivalent to the French pierre?), betrayal of the authors (by imposing our culture onto theirs) and betrayal of himself, since every translator is also a writer who must execute someone else's vision. "In the Beginning" charts Rabassa's life-defined by serendipity, he asserts coyly. By his account, he wandered more or less by chance from Yonkers, where he was born in 1922, to Dartmouth, to military service in WWII, to graduate work at Columbia in Spanish and Portuguese (because journalism involved "too much legwork" and law "too much grinding"). When he agreed to editor Sara Blackburn's request to translate Cortazar's Rayuela (Hopscotch), he hadn't even read it. Here, Rabassa introduces his modus operandi: "True to my original instincts (or perhaps my inherent laziness and impatience)," he writes, "I translated the book as I read it for the first time." It was a successful technique, apparently, because he ended up translating five other books by Cortazar, works by Guatemalan novelist-folklorist Miguel Angel Asturias, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize, and many of Garc'a Marquez's novels. The author declared that he liked the English version of his huge bestseller One Hundred Years of Solitude better than his original Spanish-"Maybe in some way I was simply translating in a way close to theway he wrote it," Rabassa notes earnestly (and clunkily). Part Two, "The Bill of Particulars," discusses in some detail each author he has translated, while Part Three's single essay declares his "ultimate dissatisfaction with any translation I have done."Grateful readers of these works in English will disagree.

Kirkus Reviews