The Rumpus Interview With Gregory Rabassa Rabassa, now ninety-one years old, has something distinctly elfin and mischievous about him and loves making jokes. He told me his favorite composers were the “three B’s”: Beethoven, Bach, and Basie. We chatted about the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the living room of his apartment—turns out he made them himself and claims it wasn’t difficult. Soon this friendly patter helped me get over feeling too daunted to speak to this man who is almost singlehandedly responsible for sparking the American love affair with Latin American novels, translating over thirty novels from the Spanish and Portuguese—enough of the greats to fill a respectable small library (Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, José Lezama Lima, Mario Vargas Llosa, António Lobo Antunes, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Jorge Amado, and many more). His many distinctions also include the National Book Award for Translation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN American Center’s Gregory Kolovakos Award. #gregoryrabassa #susanbernofsky #translation #interview #therumpus
