But I made it!
Once upon I time, I promised you I'd be reading Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason, a memoir of translation. This guy is just about unbelievable, having translated dozens of works by different Spanish- and Portuguese-language authors. Also, of course, he seems to be fluent in every other language out there, including Latin. His enthusiasm for the perfect word or phrase is adorable, in the way as nerdy scientists who are so passionate about something utterly obscure. It's also intimidating, as he goes crazy (especially in the first section) with tangential asides and references.
Which reminds me, the first section of this short but rather dense book is about how he came to translation, and his defense of it as cultural mediator. (He also has great fun with untranslatables, words that have no English equivalent or that even lose something simply because the word sounds different and therefore must carry something different.) The last two thirds is his "list of particulars" - short chapters on every author he has translated and some details about the specific joys and challenges of each author's works. How few of them I knew (thank goodness for Gabriel Garcia Marquez) was a reminder of all the avenues of literature I have yet to explore. And this book provides a great reading list for anyone looking to discover Latin American (and particularly Brazilian) literature.
I'll leave you with a couple quotes that encapsulate the paradox of translation:
The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all the other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and writer his ass off.and
...a translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print.
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