Kurt Andersen and America’s most renowned translator, GregoryRabassa, look at translation beyond literature, across art forms, and between cultures.
Rabassa is a professor at Queens College and among the best American translators working today. He has translated more than 30 novels from Spanish and Portuguese into English — including works by Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Jorge Amado, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who has said that Rabassa’s English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than the original Spanish. Last month the PEN American Center gave him a career achievement award for his contributions to the appreciation of Hispanic literature.