If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents

by Gregory Rabassa

Gregory Rabassa’s influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected works in world literature. (García Márquez 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 coolheaded 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 [Cortázar’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 longawaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

Genres: Nonfiction, Language, Writing, Memoir, Essays, Linguistics, Latin American

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 27, 2005

About the author

Gregory Rabassa was a literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who taught at Queens College. His translations include works by literary giants such as António Lobo Antunes, Jorge Amado, Mario Vargas Llosa, José Lezama Lima, Gabriel García Márquez and Eça de Queirós.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

RIP Gregory Rabassa. Our world literature owes you a huge debt.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/886ae6...

Just have to point out this howler from the above link :: "He broke into mainstream publishing in the 1960s when an editor at Pantheon Books asked him to translate Salazar's Hopscotch, a stream-of-consciousness novel that had the Spanish title Rayuela." But several bits I'd read in this book, like :: 'Friendship meant that Cortazar not only forgave the occasional error by his translator, but sometimes welcomed it. Rabassa remembered working on a sentence about an egg left too long in a frying pan and inadvertently reversed two letters. A correction was unnecessary, Cortazar declared. The mistake was an improvement. And so, in tribute to the ceramic state of stale food, "fried eggs" remained "fired eggs."'




___________
There are two kinds of people who do things -- those who can talk about what they do and those that can't. Of those that can I'll give as evidence for instance John Barth and William Gass both of whom talk about what they do as well as they do what they do. Also, I'll never forget this first impression of mine of a very young Hilary Hahn talking about playing the violin like as if she'd been doing it and thinking about it for decades already :: The Art of the Violin. You don't have to listen long to know if a competent practitioner is also a competent commentator upon that same practice. ALL athletes are incompetent to comment upon their practice -- no matter how excellently they may excel at what it is they do. At any rate, I'll have to place Rabassa more in the latter camp than the former. His memoir is a nice thing to pass through ;; but let's just say that in comparison to Suzanne Jill Levine's book Rabassa's sheds only a slight light upon what he does. Read what he does by all means! His doing is of that kind of excelling excellence! I mean, you'll not forget Gabo's quip about his Englishing of Solitude exceeding the excellence of his own Spanishing of that same novel. And pay no mind to those nasty little bugs Señor Rabassa calls Professor Horrendo with their literalist caviling "What is lost! What is lost!" paying no mind to what is gained [the recent stuff re: P&V is about as dull as dishsoap]. Also, those Professors Horrendo, you just smile at them and patiently ask if they've read Larva. If they've read Three Trapped Tigers. Etc.




A thing re :: The Devil to Pay in the Backlands -->
(p70ff) "When I first got to Brazil in 1962 the books people were talking about were two novels : Grande Sertao: Veredas, by Joao Guimaraes Rosa (translated as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, ugh! [sic! referring to the title translation choice, I do believe] and The Apple in the Dark, by Clarice Lispector. I got hold of them at once and was pleased to see how two different writers could handle the theme of life's bewilderment in its Brazilian context with such contrasting styles and with such diverging characters and come to the same inconclusion, one befitting their time and country...... I was glad to be translating The Apple in the Dark and not Grande Sertai: Veredas. Clarice goes smoothly into English, Rosa would have to be rewritten, not translated, unless by the likes of James Joyce. His translator is immediately faced with an impossibility: Rosa's epigraph reads O diabolo na rua no meio do redemoinho (The devil in the street in the middle of the whirlwind). Take a good look at the word for whirlwind: redemoinho. There sandwiched in is the word demo, so that the devil is not only in the middle of the whirlwind but is in the middle of the word for it. The novel had already been translated but a lot had been slurred over and a lot had been left out. When Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Thomas Colchie were putting together their Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature they both agreed on the chunk of Grande Sertai: Veredas that would give the best sense of the book as a whole. Since a good part of their anthology made use of extant translations they went to The Devil to Pay in the Backlands and found that their sought-after selection had been one of the many parts left out. Tome Colchie had to do his own translation, which stands out when held against the purported version." [edit :: what Rabassa says here about this selection being left out of the English edition is incorrect. See my Review of Devil to Pay. Further, the translator of the Borzoi selection is Jack E. Tomlins, not Colchie, as credited on page 679]

{translation junkies should note that the Lispector--The Apple in the Dark--has been recently reissued in a new trans. Today the novel has only 201 gr=ratings}

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the great translators, and someone whose list of translations should just be ported straight over into your tbr list.

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This year, I'm trying to tackle the books on my shelves that sit half-read, but show some sort of promise. In that spirit, I picked up If This be Treason for the third time. Third time's a charm: I finally finished it.

I pre-ordered this book a decade ago as soon as it was announced, as I was translating a book (Dos Mujeres en Praga) for my senior thesis in undergrad. A year later, a close friend gave me a second copy (he was unaware I had a first). Unfortunately, the first part of the book turned me off. I was disappointed by Rabassa's platitudes about translation, I was bored by the personal history that brought him to the trade.

It was particularly unfortunate because the first part nearly kept me from the second, a much richer, more personal account of the translator's craft. I put the book down with the hackneyed plan of reading the other bits whenever I got around to tackling the books he was discussing. Ten years later, I still hadn't gotten around to any of them. I'm glad I abandoned that plan because Rabassa's discussion was plenty interesting without having read most of the books. He might even inspire me to pick a few of them up sooner rather than later.

I liked reading the more specific particularities and problems he encountered as he translated. I enjoyed the passages about his personal relationships with several of the authors. That said, the whole book hangs together quite loosely. I am the ideal audience: both a big fan of Latin American Literature and an amateur translator with a fascination for the craft. I still found the book only mildly interesting.

Rabassa brings up his aversion to non-fiction (except the most novelistic variety) on several occasions, and I think that comes through in this book. He is passionate about literature, but not so much translation - he enjoys translation as an act of deep reading, little more. As such, he seems bored by his own stories of translation, resigned to the impossible problems, not quite satisfied but neither nagged by dissatisfaction. This may be exactly what makes him a great translator, but it produces a rather dull memoir.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was quite excited when I spotted this at my local Algoritam: the literary memoirs of a well respected translator (he Englished several works by García Márquez, Cortázar and Vargas Llosa, among many others) with the subtitle: “Translation and Its Dyscontents”. I happen to be fascinated by translation, and I love to analyse - and lived with - its discontents, so what’s not to like here?

Well, for one, Mr Rabassa has very little to say on the subject.

He disdains translation theory, his mantra is: “I simply follow the words of the author”. Forrestgumpish, I'd call that statement.
He never reads a book in its entirety before starting out on his translation of it, and defends this lazy habit with the disingenuous argument that it “keeps his translation fresh”. He calls translation an art and not a craft, hence unteachable. (“You can teach Picasso how to mix his paints, but you cannot teach him how to paint his demoiselles.” - you can count on Mr Rabassa to do some serious name-dropping whenever given half a chance. You are no Picasso, Mr Rabassa.)

So why did he write a book about this ineffable, arty endeavour he is loath to theorize about? Out of vanity, I'm afraid. This is more about Mr Rabassa himself than about his arts and crafts. But me, myself and I, we happen to find translation more interesting than Mr Rabassa's musings.

Here's another quote I swear I did not make up:
“When I’m translating a book, I’m simply reading it in English. The further technicalities, many of which I have obviously missed, are taken care of by the copy editor.”
I can only say I hope the copy editor was payed well.

In the second part of the book Mr Rabassa reminisces about each and every translation he did in his life and finally discusses some points other translators might find useful.
You have to respect the differing voices of the different characters - yes, obviously. You have to be careful with regionalisms - duh.
You leave foreign adresses untranslated when they contain a proper name, when they contain a common name you render them in English. So Praça Bolivar stays Praça Bolivar, while Praça da Bolívia becomes Bolivia Square. Makes sense to you? Not to me.
He also argues some details (I love details, the devil is in them), such as why he translated "Cien años de soledad" as “One hundred years of solitude”. Are you convinced this is a better translation than “A hundred years of loneliness”? I am not.

But let me end by stating clearly that all of the above is not meant to suggest Mr Rabassa is a bad translator.
Translation is not a science, many decisions are judgment calls and I do not pretend to know better than the many who find Mr Rabassa’s translations to be excellent, Gabriel García Márquez amongst them (although I don’t know how good Mr García Márquez's English is…).
I think he's a poor writer, that’s all.

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is actually kind of slow-going, mostly consisting of strange linguistic digressions and discussions of authors I've never read, or even heard of. It's nerdery at its best, but only makes sense to read if you're really into any of the authors whose books he's done.

But the discussions on Cortazar made it all worth it, for me. For those of you who've read Hopscotch and 62: A Model Kit, I'll tell you this, which will blow your mind: Rabassa translated them without having read them first. He just made it up as he went along. Right? He also discusses translating Magda and Juan's Gliglish (Gliglicio in Spanish), as well as some of the cooler / crazier sections in both books. Furthermore, while translating Julio's works, Gregory consider's himself Julio's paredros, and, as the two were actually lifelong friends, Julio calls Gregory cronopio, a title Gregory says he bears 'with the pride of a knight'.

[Rebecca Thatcher-Murcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading Gregory Rabassa's memoir, I can see why he was heralded as a great translator. He has a wonderful facility with words and a great sense of humor. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I am inspired to read more Spanish and more translations.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with Gregory Rabassa was in 1985, the first time I tried to read One hundred years of solitude. Getting nowhere with it in Spanish, I tried his legendary translation and got no further: that is just not a story I am meant to finish, despite how much I loved several other García Márquez works beginning that same year.
I came to Rabassa’s memoir 40 years later as part of a delirious immersion in the art of translation, and would have given just about anything to be part of a seminar devoted to discussing it. He writes a pretty sentence, does Rabassa, and his wit and erudition are indisputable – and incomparable.
With all that brain, humor, and renown (“the translator’s translator” “We owe the rediscovery of Latin American literature to Gregory Rabassa” – and the most famous adoration of all: “Garcia Marquez said his work was better in Rabassa’s English than in the original Spanish”), he had to be kind of a jerk, right? And this memoir makes clear that he’s no one I would have wanted to know. Along with some of the smartest reflections on language I’ll ever read there is the glib dismissal of postmodernism I’ve heard from too many people who know absolutely nothing about it. There is self-importance and white male privilege that I can’t quite chalk up to generation and be done with it (about an author whose work he translated: “I was flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf. She also had those Kyrgizenaugen that so fascinated Thomas Mann.” I do not want to know what Kyrgizenaugen might be.
Still: “If truth really is beauty then it is easy for eloquence to masquerade as such and thus get away with a lie.” What to say, as you chew that over for several minutes, besides WOW? And to the extent that his translation brought Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the world, if not to me, then I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A TOP SHELF review, originally published in the July 12, 2014 edition of The Monitor

After WWII, the English-speaking world experienced a boom of interest in Latin-American literature that arguably had a profound effect on writing published across the globe. Vital to this movement was the work of Gregory Rabassa, who translated some of the key texts into English and opened the floodgates for others.

Rabassa has won multiple awards for his work: the PEN Translation Prize, the Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, and the U.S. National Book Award for Translation.

As a translator, I was excited to learn of his book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir, recipient of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Though written by a man pushing 90, the volume is full of wit and verve as well as invaluable insight into the process of one of our greatest translators.

In the first 50 pages or so, Rabassa reflects on the art of translation and its oddly disreputable position among the arts, reviewing broadly some of the linguistic and cultural conundrums translators face. He then sets out to provide personal context for his evolution into a translator: born in Yonkers, New York, into a family whose patriarch was a Cuban émigré, Rabassa lived a linguistically playful life. His college studies were interrupted by World War II, during which conflict he served an OSS cryptographer. Upon his return, he studied Romance languages and literature atDartmouth and Columbia University, where he eventually earned a doctorate and began to teach. It was here that he co-founded the journal Odyssey, which published many Latin-American stories and poems in English for the first time.

Rabassa’s memoir then goes on to walk us through a “bill of particulars,” a chronological review of all the major works in Spanish and Portuguese that he has translated. And what a list it is! Beginning with Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (a project that spawned a life-long friendship), Rabassa’s body of work contains some of the most important translations of the 20th century, including A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, who waited three years to secure Rabassa as translator and who famously said that the English version was better than the original.

From Vargas Llosa to Machado de Assis, the iteration of authors is a veritable round-up of must-reads, and the inside perspective on the authors and their interactions (or lack thereof) with the translator is eye-opening.

In the end, some may find Rabassa’s often hand-wavey explanations of the translation process frustrating. His own practice is to render a book into English as he reads it for the first time, without any real preparation or research (except on-the-fly, as needed). But as a translator, I find this honesty refreshing. Translators, at the end of the day, are just very careful readers with the uncanny skill of reading one language into another.

This book is meant for them and for anyone fascinated by Latin-American literature in general.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gregory Rabassa was born in 1922 in New York State in a Cuban sugar dealer's family. He has had an interest in Romance languages all his life: in high school he took French and Latin, in college French, Spanish and Portuguese, and serving in the U.S. Army during the Allied invasion of Italy, he learned Italian. After the war he went to graduate school, defending a dissertation on black characters in Brazilian fiction, and started teaching at Columbia. He befriended several translators of Latin American literature, and later a few Latin American writers themselves. Julio Cortázar asked him to translate his novel Rayuela (it became Hopscotch in English), which started his career as a literary translator. He went on to translate works of some 30 writers from the Spanish and Portuguese into English: Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado, Gabriel García Márquez and many less famous ones. He translated One Hundred Years (a hundred years? a century?) of Solitude (loneliness?), which begins with the sentence, "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad (firing party in British English), Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to (would?) remember (recall?) that distant (remote?) afternoon when his father took him to discover (know? make the acquaintance of?) ice." Although the novel was a bestseller, the translator did not get royalties, making do with a fixed fee for his services.

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Italian canard "traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor) leads one to feel that the translator has been held to be a lowly and treacherous knave.

Translation of a novel requires considerably more than knowledge of two languages; the translator must appreciate dialect, colloquialism and slang, and betray their meanings in the "target language" (jargon Rabassa avoids). Rabassa handles this treason, his art, making choices and exposing many authors (...too numerous to name here) in no less than three languages (Portuguese, Spanish and English) by linguistically manipulating countless objects, concepts and readers to spawn tens of thousands of "new books" from the handful he began with, finally betraying himself most of all. Or at least, so says he. After reading García Marquez in Spanish (a daunting task) and English (easier, but by no means easy), I doff my hat to the translator.

Read Rabassa’s accounts of several Latin American authors and their works, and of how their English versions emerged.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seek out Mark's comments.mi could not say things any better.

Rabassa was without s doubt the finest translator from Spanish and Portuguese in the last century. And I imagine his lectures at Queens College might have been the kind where you kind of forget to take notes, but just listen.

Sad to say, I was sorely disappointed by this "memoir." While there were sparking moments of insight, I was the work of a man already in his eighties, and, I felt, winding down.

His brief essays on individual authors are probably the best part of the book, but all too often I felt it was an exercise in, "Now, I need to write 500 words on X. What can I say?"

I am sure when the idea of this great translator's impressions was pitched, it seemed a good idea at the time.

My advice? Read the translations. If you want information about individual writers, look them up on Wikipedia.

[Ibrahim Badshah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gregory Rabassa has been my favorite translator before I read this book and now he is my favoritest. I have read his translations with the utmost admiration. Now reading this memoir, I understood what made them beautiful. He is a literalist, it seems. Being a translator, I agree with most of what he says. He takes minimum liberty with the texts. He yields to the source text. His discussion of translating the titles is truly interesting. Indeed, he is my role model.

Like the leaves on trees, words age, yellow, and drop off after a time (16)
This bears out my thesis that a good translation is essentially a good reading. (49)
I read the complete novel (Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar) only as I translated it (51)
We translators will not be shot at cock's crow, but neither shall we walk about free of our own doubts that we may have somehow done something treasonable in our work. (189)

[Rise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A memoir by wunderkind translator Gregory Rabassa, the book details his childhood intimations of a facility for languages and his initiation into the art of translation. It also describes, lovingly, his various relationships with authors he translated, the background information on the books he worked on, and his candid estimations of each of his translated author or book. What makes the book very palatable to me, other than Rabassa's priceless interactions with diverse writers, is the inside stories in the process of translation. The book is priceless in this score.

You can view Rabassa's very impressive résumé here.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book so much; first on a linguistic level, enjoying the play and negotiation in the specificity with which Rabassa addresses diction choices from Spanish or Portuguese into English. Secondly in just being such a profound fan of Rabassa himself as a translator and the works he has translated (while he of course gave us the most beautiful rendering of Aureliano Buendía’s memory of ice, he also made an absolute masterwork in the Autumn of the Patriarch). It was true fun to read upon embarking into his recollection of translation each author and his processes. An excellent, clear eyed memoir filing insight into a wonderful literary prism.

[Marco Díaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot to learn from the art of translation in this book. Mr. Rabassa tries to prove with examples the impossibility of translation and how this task will usually imply some kind of treason. He also walks us through every published translation (and also those awaiting publishing) he ever did, the relationship he had with the authors he translated, and the major difficulties he encountered along the way. All in all, if you have been in this craft for a while, you'll identify with what he is referring to when he claims dissatisfaction of what he has translated.

[EJ Darisse · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a very interesting peek into the world and challenges translators face. It’s an interesting format how the author goes book by book noting the translation difficulties posed by each unique work in his career. It started to feel repetitive towards the end, but the chapters shortened as the book went on. The heady intro and conclusion seemed a bit divorced from the “rap sheet” but the book stands up well because the material is good and the author is well networked and has a great self deprecating sense of humor.

[Amir · Rating 2 out of 5]

The man is a masterful translator, but one cannot help but feel that it was his prolonged closeness with publishers which got this out into the world. As a translator it held some points of comfortable identity, but other than that it was a long conversation which, while fascinating in person, was not a book.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I received this book as a gift after finishing a Masters degree that focused heavily on translation. I found the autobiography portion of this memoir to be fascinating and entertaining. The in depth details of how he translated each work was not as appealing to me as I have not read many of his translations, but I did pick up some useful tips and felt inspired.

[N Kalyan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly enjoyable book, especially if you've been a literary translator for some years. There is much here to like and mull over, from the difficulties with titles and names to translating places and times that one has missed in one's own life. There are many gems here that need to be savoured over and over again. A great memoir for translators and those interested in them.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

the book itself is not amazing - an interesting life told well. however, it is a who's who of Latin American authors who I would never had heard of had I not read this book. For me, it's been a map to finding some of the best books i've ever read.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a slow read, mainly because I was not familiar with many of the authors he talks about nor was I familiar with the linguistic aspects of the novel. However, it has influenced me to read more Latin American and Brazilian authors since the texts he has translated seem really interesting.

[Daniel Burton-Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd like to see a book like this from Howard Goldblatt, one of the most prolific translators of Chinese literature.

[Julia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully informative, a must read for those of us who have to read world literature in translation.

[William Schill · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unusual type of book
Four stars largely for all the brief notes on books he translated and which I now want to read.

[Juan Botero-Meneses · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rather entertaining memoir from one of the best translators out there.

[edinblack · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has two parts: six chapters at the beginning about the art of translation and Gregory Rabassa's life as a translator, and a second—thankfully longer—part consisting of chapters each written about one of the many authors he has translated from Spanish and Portuguese. Some of these are well-known names, such as Jorge Amado, Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, and Gabriel García Márquez; others are "cult" authors, such as Dalton Trevisan. Gabriel García Márquez stands out insofar as he said that Rabassa's English translation of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was even better than the Spanish original!
The second part is very enjoyable, full of stories about the authors, about the coincidences that brought them to him, the particular hurdles of translating their work, and the personal connections that grew along the way. To me, reading each of these was like eating candy: they were great fun to read, but I knew as I finished each chapter that I would immediately forget almost everything I had just read as soon as I was done. To be fair, Rabassa is not setting out seafaring adventures or acts of derring-do (though he did spend time in the military, working in the Office of Strategic Services), and yet it seems odd that the art of painting a scene or telling a good story did not rub off more from all the literature he translated. (By comparison, the autobiography of Paul Feyerabend, the philosopher of science, Killing Time, is much more memorable, due to the crazy schemes he cooked up, most of them to lessen his workload. Then again, if Rabassa had written an autobiography, he might have had better stories to choose from.)
The first part, a little less than a third of the book, made up of essays about translation and his life as a translator, was a spottier experience. When Rabassa ruminated, it was often not to my taste, but as soon as he would return to discussing the actual ins and out of the publishing world, literary trends, world literature, etc., then it suddenly became very engaging again.
Although it is clear from the stories he tells that he formed many fast friendships, the attitude that sometimes comes across from the writing is dismissive, curmudgeonly, and resentful. (Again, by comparison, Paul Feyerabend, although he also writes off many people with whom he disagrees, doesn't come off as bitter as Rabassa sometimes does.) He also sometimes discusses what could be interesting aspects of Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian, but without enough detail or context to understand the point he is making. (I was almost tempted to write him a letter for more clarification until I realized he was no longer alive.)
Overall, it pulled me forward—as I said, most of it was like eating candy—but Rabassa's occasional pomposity and the fact that some passages from which I should have been able to learn about Spanish or Portuguese were ultimately impenetrable (as least to me) took away from the pleasure of the treat. He was best when he simply recounted his experiences—his reflections sometimes fell flat.

[Emma]

I've been a fan of Gregory Rabassa's translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold for a while and admire him greatly. Though I think he's an excellent writer on his own, as is shown by this wry and clever memoir, I agree with others who think he's not very passionate about writing ABOUT writing. He doesn't explain how he translates in great detail, save for the broad "follow the voice of the writer." His chapters about each writer he translated are fun to read, less because of the explanations of the translating process than because of Rabassa's relationship with each writer. He was close with Julio Cortázar in particular, who is described as a genial man who got along splendidly with children (he was "a great child" himself, says Rabassa) and sometimes changed his own manuscripts to better fit ideas Rabassa had for the translation. I'm glad I read the book, but I don't know that I'd call it a favorite.

[Claire Abs]

to-read

[Kevin S · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Leif · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first essay, "The Many Faces of Treason", is necessary reading. Here, just listen to the way it opens:

Commonplaces may come and go, but one that has held forth over the years to the dismay and discouragement of translators is the Italian punning canard traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor), leading one to believe that the translator, worse than an unfortunate bungler, is a treacherous knave. Before copping a plea and offering a nolo contendere, let me see wherein this treason lies and against whom. Then we translators can withdraw once more into that limbo of silent servitors, for, as Prince Segismundo says at the end of Calderon's Life Is a Dream when he awards his liberator the tower where he has been imprisoned, "The treason done, the traitor is no longer needed."

What ensues from this point is very much a grand old man holding forth: suspicious of "new" movements such as deconstruction, postmodernism, multiculturalism and, yes, email, yet deeply engaged with many prominent and thoughtful Lusophone, Hispanic and Latin American authors. The strain of the book as a whole tells, however, and there is some repetition of material. Further, this memoir should not be confused for a theoretical text: outside the first few chapters Rabassa contents himself with describing his own memories and judgements of the works and contexts of translated works; he does not, unfortunately, spend much time discussing the how of translation, and even less telling us why. His friendship with the authors he's translated (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Miguel Ángel Asturias) must have been very rewarding to him. But it does not translate into much of a book, I'm afraid.