Within a Sky Full of Earth

Gabriel Gárcia Márquez says it all: "He is the best Latin American writer in the English language."

Gregory Rabassa influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected works in world literature. (García Márquez was known to say that the English translation of One Hundred Years was better than the Spanish original.) In If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Rabassa offers a coolheaded and humorous defense of translation, laying out his views on the translator's art. Anecdotal and always illuminating, Rabassa traces his career from a boyhood on a New Hampshire farm, his school days "collecting" languages, the two and a half years he spent overseas during WWII, and his South American travels, until one day "I signed a contract to do my first translation of a long work [Cortázar's Hopscotch] for a commercial publisher." Additionally, Rabassa offers us his "rap sheet," a consideration of the various authors and the over 40 works he has translated. This longawaited memoir is a joy to read, an instrumental guide to translating, and a look at the life of one of its great practitioners.

GREGORY RABASSA was born in Yonkers in 1922. He studied at Dartmouth and, in 1942, volunteered for the Army, serving in the Office of Strategic Services. When he returned home after the war, he received a Ph.D. from Columbia. His translations of works by such literary giants as Jorge Amado, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez have become classics. He is presently Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at Queens College, New York.

His translations are available on New Directions Publishing, one of the best and exquisite publishers around the world and Bloom is shipping it to Macau.

A fine summing up by the translator who brought such notable Latin American authors to the attention of English-speaking readers.
Kirkus Reviews

Represents an insider's view that is available nowhere else, and everyone, neophytes as well as past or present Spanish majors, can profit from it.
Michael Henry Heim, L. A. Times Book Review