IF THIS BE TREASON:
Translation and its Dyscontents
A memoir
Gregory Rabassa
New Directions $21.95, 189 pages
If there were an order of merit for services to world literature, Gregory Rabassa would probably be at the top of the honours list. As a translator he is responsible for bringing Latin American authors such as Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar to a wider public’s attention. Among writers whose work he has rendered into English are two Nobel laureates - Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias - as well as famously close contenders for the award, including Portugal’s Antonio Lobo Antunes and the late Jorge Amado, of Brazil. To say that Rabassa has done more than anyone else to promote Spanish and Portuguese language literature abroad might not be an exaggeration.
Now in his early eighties, Rabassa has penned a memoir with a title that alludes to the famous invective equating translators to traitors: “traduttore, traditore”. If translation is, indeed, treason, Rabassa willingly confesses to his crime. Not, however, without first making an impassioned plea for the translator’s craft to be judged by its own merits rather than as a derivative literary activity. “The translator…is a writer too,” Rabassa says. “As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been provided.”
Born in Yonkers, New York, to a Cuban father and an American mother, Rabassa grew up in between languages and cultures. The makings of a translator, he concedes, were in his personal circumstances. “I have always thought that I just stumbled into translation because it was there, serendipity, but with my wiser retro-vision I can see that I harboured certain traits that fit nicely in with the needs of translation and which I have honed sharp through use.”
Given his distinguished track record, Rabassa’s improvisational approach to the craft is refreshing. “Translation was not a metier I had set out to follow,” he explains, “nor did I prepare myself for it with any conscious training or contemplation.” When asked to translate the notoriously complex Hopscotch by Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, he simply did it as he went along, without having read the whole book first. This, he claims, is still his modus operandi.
There is no disputing Rabassa’s importance as a literary translator. His memoir, however, is strangely insubstantial. What might have been an elegant and insightful investigation into the art of translation is padded with avuncular humour, sideswipes at academics and literary critics, and metaphors that fall flat. Rabassa makes much of a lifetime of professional success that is hardly riveting on the printed page. An early sign of this comes in his ponderous description of a moment of “epiphany”, a “mystical revelation”, an “existential awakening” - the realisation, at age three, that certain words correspond to certain objects.
There is little self-criticism in the book (except to concede that a translator can never be totally satisfied with his work) and much boasting under the guise of false modesty. Rabassa is all too keen to repeat that Gabriel Garcia Marquez declared the English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude superior to the Spanish.
Fond of wise aphorisms, his prose occasionally verges on the Daoist. “If you ponder, you will have lost the path,” is one of his perplexing pronouncements. And for someone who claims to shun academic formality, his style can be starchy to the point of obscurity. “There, then, is the explication of my translating,” is a typical clincher, while his use of “yclept” (an archaic term for “named” or “dubbed”) smacks of showmanship. Perhaps the most engaging aspect of the book is what Rabassa calls his “rap sheet” or his “bill of particulars”, a summing up of each of the authors he has translated in the course of a long and prolific career. Cortazar’s readers will be amused to discover how Rabassa dealt with the Argentine author’s invented language, gliglico. Fans of Garcia Marquez will no doubt want to know that one of his early books, In Evil Hour, was originally meant to be called “This Shitty Town”. There is a memorable description of Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, “that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf”.
Every author he has “done” gets his or her own chapter. But rather than studying each in a self-contained fragment illuminating a particular aspect of the translation process, he has awkwardly strung the whole together, making it necessary for readers to get through most of his book if they wish to understand his jokes and allusions towards the end. Tighter editing might have solved that problem and eliminated tiresome repetitions; an index would have made the volume easier to use.
”Nowadays as I look away into the distance,” writes Rabassa at the end of a chapter on Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “I can see that I have reached the age where everything beyond a hundred yards is all Monet, while once it had been Courbet. There is compensation, however, as the vistas of my imagination become Hieronymus Bosch, one more bit of evidence that old age is the baroque moment of existence.” It is in this poignant (if contrived) passage that we first catch a glimpse of the sense of personal frailty underpinning Rabassa’s memoir. It is unfortunate that such a distinguished career should be crowned by such a slight work.
The book’s shortcomings point to something that Rabassa hints at in its pages. Like writing a novel, literary translation is difficult to apprehend. Any attempt at describing the process whereby a text in one language is brought to life in another will inevitably fall short - especially since it involves a translator’s intuition and knowledge of two cultures, as much as his or her ear for the music and rhythm of language. “Translation may be impossible, but it can at least be essayed,” writes Rabassa, refusing to bow to Robert Frost’s truism about poetry being what is lost in translation. So too, with disappointing results, has he now “essayed” an “explication” of his trade.