Professor Gregory Rabassa of Queens College has brought the finest gems of Latin American literature to the English-speaking world. CUNY Matters editor Ron Howell interviewed him this summer. Rabassa is proud to be from a CUNY family. His wife Clementine C. Rabassa is Professor Emerita of Humanities from Medgar Evers College.

	Professor Gregory and Clementine Rabassa

CUNY Matters: Professor [Gregory] Rabassa, you’ve translated the most significant novels to come out of Latin America. Tell us about some of them.

Rabassa: Well I suppose you’ve got to start with 100 Years of Solitude, which is probably the most famous. But then there is the first one I did, Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar . . . That was 1965 and it won the National Book Award, so I look upon that as kind of a landmark . . .

Q: How many books have you done?

A: About fifty, I’d say.

Q: But that’s more than a book a year.

A: Sometimes I do more than a book in one year. Two books or three books sometimes and then another year with no books. But it averages out.

Q: Now, after forty years of translating others, you’re writing your first book, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents. Tell us about it.

A: Well, the “y” is a play on words, of course. It (refers to) mistakes that are made in translations.…The book is a memoir of sorts. It’s not about theory. I don’t think there’s any place for any theories in literature or art for that matter. It’s about how a translation works and all of that. The second half is talk about authors. I discuss my experience with each one—two or three pages, sometimes more, for each one . . . It will be out in the spring, with New Directions.

Q: Was writing your own book more, or less, difficult than translating?

A: It was much easier. Maybe it’s the nature of the book. I wasn’t writing fiction, so I didn’t have to imagine anything. I didn’t have to look much up.

Q: How do you approach translating novels as esoteric and magical as those you’ve worked on?

A: I sit down with the typewriter, book, dictionary and I think maybe the best explanation is . . . that I read the book, but then I read it in English as I put it down on paper. Then I’ll go back and rewrite it, smooth it up.

Q: Of the authors you translated, which were you closest to?

A: I was probably closest to Julio Cortazar. Garcia Marquez I met a couple of times but he wasn’t around very much. He let me go my own way. But Julio visited us a couple of times, he listened to old jazz records, my 78 collection and all that . . . And then there was Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, the Ecuadorian novelist who was living [in exile] in Mexico. He was getting kicked out all the time. But I got to know him quite well and my wife, Clem, wrote her doctoral dissertation about his work.

Q: What can you say, Professor, about this amazing explosion of the past thirty years in immigration from Latin America? How has it affected the teaching of literature at CUNY?

A: It has brought us students, as immigrants or the children of immigrants, and that has boosted our programs. I think also, the interaction amongst students gets other students involved in what the culture is. Spanish at Queens is the runaway language for language teaching and a good many of the students go on to study the literature.

Q: You teach a course, Hispanic Literature in Translation. What’s the experience of teaching like now, after several decades?

A: When I first started teaching I was about the same age as my students, and I still labor under that delusion. So I’m sort of surprised when I realize that these students here could be my grandchildren. But I still have this sort of idea of equality, which I think helps because it saves you from pontificating.

Q: Tell us about where you grew up, your family, and the schools you attended.

A: I grew up out in the country north of Hanover (New Hampshire). So I went to Dartmouth, got a nice scholarship. In high school I studied French and Latin. I didn’t take Spanish until I got to college. The old man [my father], he was Cuban but he didn’t speak much Spanish. My mother was a New Yorker WASP so English was the language [at home].

Q: You mentioned a love of jazz. Is there an intrinsic relationship between a love of music and a love of foreign languages?

A: I do think [music] may have something to do with translation or the ear for language. I like chamber music more than anything else. . . . My old teacher, Ramon Guthrie, who was a poet and quite a fellow, a veteran of the Escadrille Lafayette in World War I, he claimed that Proust wrote his novel based on the structure of Beethoven’s fourteenth quartet. So I play that lots of times. . . . I guess that’s the connection. Maybe. I don’t know.