Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy

This book takes the case of Gregory Rabassa, translator into English of such canonical novels as García Márquez's Cien años de soledad and Cortázar's Rayuela. In the chapters, the author historicizes the translator's practice by investigating Rabassa's ideas about translation and his own practice, the relationship between Rabassa and "his" authors, and the circulation and reception of Rabassa's translations, especially of the works of the so-called Latin American Boom. By critically engaging Rabassa as a translating subject, this book affirms the translator's active role in shaping literary traditions and in producing texts and knowledge. Rabassa emerges as an active subject in the inter-American literary exchange, an agent bound to history and to the forces involved in the production of culture.

María Constanza Guzmán is associate professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she is appointed to the School of Translation, the Department of Hispanic Studies, and the Graduate Program in Humanities.