GREGORY RABASSA: IN MEMORIAM

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that his novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude read better in the English translation by Gregory Rabassa than it did in Spanish. Marquez's novel is more than simply one of the greatest, and most popular, of the Twentieth Century. It opened the door for multiple generations of Latin American novelists to reach out in the world, and it ignited a spread of so-called 'magic realism' which had such a huge affect first in Canada and then in Britain.

Marquez waited three years for Rabassa to be ready to do his translation; he did so on the recommendation of Julio Cortzar. And I came to Marquez via Rabassa just as slowly, and also through Cortazar. 

Cortazar originally became a sensation because his short-story 'The End Of The Game', was the source material for the film Blow Up. I remember finding the short-story collection, in an intriguing Vintage edition, but though I have been scouring my memory I cannot recall which of two motivations brought me to the book. It may have been because of the ferocious debate between two teachers at my high school over the meaning of the final scene on the tennis court ('the meaning is that there IS NO MEANING', one of them shouted, impressing us students no end). But it was more likely that I'd been struck by Paul Blackburn's marvellous long poem 'The Watchers' which I found in an old issue of The New Yorker I read in a doctor's office while waiting for my head to be stitched. I was seeking out Blackburn's work, and he had translated Cortazar's stories.

Either way, I moved from those stories to Cortazar's novel Hopscotch, a dazzling work meant to be read twice, the second time in a different order of chapters dictated by the author. Hence the title. It was baffling but engaging, and its translator was Gregory Rabassa. Even as a youth, with no knowledge of Spanish, I could sense the dexterity of the translation. Later I read an interview in which Rabassa commented that translating the book was 'fun', because Cortazar knew 'humour and pathos are really all the same thing, what should be called love, maybe.'

My copy of Hopscotch was a Signet book, but it led me to a relatively uniform series of Latin American paperbacks issued under Avon Books' Bard imprint, edited by a young Peter Mayer. Ironically, I still like the Signet Hopscotch better than Bard's. These were the days when imprints like Signet, Bard, Vintage, or New American Library issued classics and what would now be ghettoised as 'literary fiction' in mass-market editions that sat on the wire-racks of drug stores and newstands alongside potboilers, science fiction, mysteries and everything else.

They were cheap and portable and they opened new worlds to readers tempted to just a hint of adventurousness. Bard published One Hundred Years Of Solitude, and through them I moved on to discover the likes of G. Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marcio Souza, and Manuel Puig. Many of them were Rabassa's translations: Autumn Of The Patriarch and Chronicle Of A Death Foretold; Jorge Amado's Captain of The Sands, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversations In A Cathedral. He didn't do more with Vargas Llosa, partly, he told an interviewer, because 'his English is not as strong as he thinks it is'.

Rabassa chose his projects well. Simply looking for his name as translator would lead a reader to the discoveries of Miguel Angel Asturias' Mulata; Jose Lezama Lima's Paradisio, and Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Camacho's Beat. But I'm not sure of exactly how Rabassa could judge such things; he said that he translated as he read a work, rather than reading it first and beginning the translation afterwards.

Although one felt drawn to the exotic nature of Rabassa''s translations, his actual background was more prosaic. His father was Cuban, but he grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire. He studied languages at Dartmouth and Columbia, worked as a cryptographer during the war, taught at Columbia and at Queens College afterward. He died in the unlikely setting of Branford, Connecticut in a hospice where I am sure some members of my family's circle saw out their last days.

Rabassa wrote a memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents. Remember how he worked, translating as he read? You can see why it worked so well, because in the memoir he reminded us: 'The translator, we should know, is a writer too. 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 other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off.'

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: AN INCOMPARABLE, ILLIMITABLE VISION

You could argue that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the best, and possibly the most influential, novelist of the second half of the last century. One Hundred Years Of Solitude was near the top of my own list of the 20^th Century's greatest novels, and it's one of those rare books that both appeals to critics and to the general non-literary public. Love In The Time Of Cholera is not all that far behind Solitude, and he wrote a number of other fine books.

He's often described as the major figure in 'magic realism', though that was a term he didn't have much time for. You might say he, and his contemporaries, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, and others who made Latin American fiction so dynamic in the 70s and 80s were influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortazar and Alejo Carpentier—but they were also influenced by many more traditional story-tellers, not just in the Spanish language. And they were able to find a kind of fiction that reflected the illogically fantastic world of history and reality in Central and South America. What sets Marquez apart from his contemporaries is his sense of historical scope, matched only by Vargas Llosa, combined with a wide humanity, and a loving, humorous approach which can easily be absurdist, a sort of Vonnegut without the stand-up punch lines.

Gene Wolfe once said that magic realism was 'just fantasy written in Spanish' and there is a certain amount of truth in that too—I think these Latin American writers in the 70s were also using elements of that post-modern revolution of the Sixties, breaking down boundaries of fiction, and giving their own familiar tales a new spin. A similar thing was happening on a smaller scale in Canada; you'll think immediately of Michael Ondaatje, maybe early Margaret Atwood, but there were others, most notably Ray Smith and his novel Lord Nelson Tavern, who reflected a similar approach. Later, as the term magic realism took hold, its influence spread, and you can see it in everything from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison to Tom Robbins.

I'm surprised that, as magnificent as One Hundred Years Of Solitude is, I don't remember better when and where and how I came to read it. But I don't. I recall vividly my beautiful Avon/Bard edition, which wasn't published until 1971, so it had to have been sometime after that, probably not long.

I do know by then I had read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, in its 1967 Signet edition, another handsome paperback not unlike Pynchon's V, and with much of the same appeal. Hopscotch would later be reissued in a later Avon/Bard reprint—I should say that I could fill a shelf with those Bard translation of Latin novels, with their uniform look and imaginative covers. Hopscotch was what we might call post-modern; you read the novel and then went back and re-read it in a different order selected by Cortazar. You can see the link with Borges, and in its playfulness, the link to Marquez. The translation was by Gregory Rabassa, who would later do Solitude, and for it win the first-ever National Book Award for translation. Marquez has been well-served by his translators—Rabassa and then Edith Grossman.

So I may have come to Marquez via Cortazar, which would mean via Paul Blackburn. I remember reading Blackburn's poem 'The Watchers' in an old New Yorker in a doctor's waiting room; I think I was getting my head stitched up. A little research reveals it was the 10 December 1966 issue of the New Yorker, which means it was probably early 1967, and I was either 15 or 16. My poetic eyes had been opened by E.E. Cummings, but this was something new, another step forward. From there I then noticed somehow that Blackburn was the translator of End Of The Game, a collection of Cortazar's stories that would soon be retitled Blow Up, after the movie based on that story came out. That led me, in my own literary hopscotch,  to Hopscotch, and at some point, to Solitude.

And years later I would meet a woman who had attended Marquez's son's wedding in Mexico City, and it had snowed. I wrote a poem about that, which you can read here.

I have to say I knew even as I was reading the novel, it would be one of the greatest I would ever read, and nothing in the past four decades has changed that opinion. I have huge admiration for his other writing, Autumn Of The Patriarch and The General In His Labyrinth in particular, and as I say, with Cholera he came up with another novel whose beauty resonates on a vast human level. He was an astute journalist and a courageous figure politically—he was barred from the US for decades before Bill Clinton at last invited him to the White House. His politics remained on the left even as Vargas Llosa moved past the third way into a run at the Peruvian presidency as a free-marketeer. The feud which disturbed their friendship was personal, but the political differences widened and strengthened the rift. His memors read almost exactly as you'd expect, as if the magic and the realism were blended together out of personal history. His is an incomparable, illimitable vision.

JOSE SARAMAGO: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obituary of Jose Saramago is in today's Independent, you can link to it here. Although they gave me plenty of space, it would have been nice to have examined the influence of the Latin American novelists--check out his reviews, perhaps, in the decades when he wasn't writing novels himself. I find the links to Borges, Cortazar, and Vargas Llosa particularly strong; with Borges' getting more and more apparently in the books that followed the Nobel. I probably should have mentioned The Old Man And The Sea in the context of Tale Of The Unknown Island. Saramago is sometimes claimed by sf, and rightly so, but that is a can of wormy labelling I didn't want to open. I would have also liked to mention his translators, because he seems to have been incredibly well-served by them, particularly Giovanni Pontiero and Margaret Jull Costa.

In America, his political views probably attracted more attention than his fiction, and certainly he was a crusty old communist. You can argue that, for a man who used words so carefully, his words often seemed calculated to inflame, or offend, as much as enlighten; I'm sure he would argue that the reaction to his words, even if ill-chosen, simply proved his points. As if to prove that, David 'Axis Of Evil' Frum was typically over-the-top in writing a piece called 'Death Of A Jew-Hater', but made some interesting points about Saramago's position during the years of dictatorship in Portugal; though I'm not sure that, as someone happy to work for a proto-fascist regime, he was the best-placed to pass judgement on them accurately. But he was cogent enough to get me to note the fact that despite his much-publicised exile in protest from Portugal, Saramago quietly continued to maintain a residence in Lisbon, which struckme as practical, if somewhat diluting the scale of the protest. Frum was, however, correct in summarizing that 'no one requires an artist to be a hero' and that posterity will judge Saramago's work on its own merit. And that judgement will likely be extremely positive for years to come.