Gregory Rabassa, translator who helped introduce Gabriel Garcia Marquez, dead at 94
He also translated the work of writers like Mario Vargas Llosa and Julio Cortazar, propelling the Latin American writing boom in the 1960s.
Gregory Rabassa, prominent literary translator, died on Tuesday in Branford, Connecticut. The cause for his death was not announced. Rabassa is known for his translations of several well-known Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Clarice Lispector and Jorje Amado. Rabassa, who worked primarily in Spanish and Portuguese, won the PEN Translation prize in 1977, and PEN/Ralph Manheim medal for Translation in 1982.
Marquez waited three years so Rabassa could translate his novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude, reported AP. “Rabassa is the only translator who has never asked for something to be clarified so he can put a footnote in. I think that my work has been completely re-created in English,” Marquez had said. The Nobel prize winner called Rabassa “the best Latin American writer in the English language”. Rabassa translated five other novels by Marquez.
