Grateful readers of these works in English will disagree.
A fine summing-up by the translator who brought such notable Latin American authors as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar to the attention of English-speaking readers.
In three parts, Rabassa surveys his long, distinguished career in translation. The first essay, “The Many Faces of Treason,” treats the “varieties of betrayal” inherent in his art: betrayal of the word (can stone ever be truly equivalent to the French pierre?), betrayal of the authors (by imposing our culture onto theirs) and betrayal of himself, since every translator is also a writer who must execute someone else’s vision. “In the Beginning” charts Rabassa’s life—defined by serendipity, he asserts coyly. By his account, he wandered more or less by chance from Yonkers, where he was born in 1922, to Dartmouth, to military service in WWII, to graduate work at Columbia in Spanish and Portuguese (because journalism involved “too much legwork” and law “too much grinding”). When he agreed to editor Sara Blackburn’s request to translate Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch), he hadn’t even read it. Here, Rabassa introduces his modus operandi: “True to my original instincts (or perhaps my inherent laziness and impatience),” he writes, “I translated the book as I read it for the first time.” It was a successful technique, apparently, because he ended up translating five other books by Cortázar, works by Guatemalan novelist-folklorist Miguel Ángel Asturias, who subsequently won the Nobel Prize, and many of García Márquez’s novels. The author declared that he liked the English version of his huge bestseller One Hundred Years of Solitude better than his original Spanish—“Maybe in some way I was simply translating in a way close to the way he wrote it,” Rabassa notes earnestly (and clunkily). Part Two, “The Bill of Particulars,” discusses in some detail each author he has translated, while Part Three’s single essay declares his “ultimate dissatisfaction with any translation I have done.”
Grateful readers of these works in English will disagree.Pub Date: April 27, 2004
ISBN: 0-8112-1619-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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