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English(English) Article

The Peculiar Perils of Literary Translation

About the Article

Article
https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/peculiar-perils-literary-translation
Journal
Columbia Magazine
Issued Date
January 16, 2022
Page
-
Language
English(English)
Country
UNITED STATES
City
New York
Book
-
Writer
Lee Kiho

About the Author

  • Lee Kiho
  • Birth : 1972 ~ -
  • Occupation : Novelist
  • First Name : Kiho
  • Family Name : Lee
  • Korean Name : 이기호
  • ISNI : 0000000043629096
  • Works : 16
Descriptions - 1 Languages
  • English(English)

In 1978, Gregory Rabassa ’54GSAS, famed translator of Gabriel García Márquez ’71HON, Julio Cortázar, and Mario Vargas Llosa, was asked about a review in the Washington Post of a novel by the Guatemalan writer and Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias. Rabassa had translated the book from Spanish into English, and though the reviewer praised the richness of Asturias’s language, he never once mentioned Rabassa. It was as if the reader had absorbed the author’s words directly, without any mediator. Rabassa, who taught Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia from 1948 to 1969, wryly wondered aloud whether the reviewer even knew the book had been translated. “This would seem to be an additional argument,” Rabassa quipped, “for the placing of the translator’s name on the dust jacket of the book.”

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