Conversation & Reading

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016), A Celebration

Fri, Oct 21, 2016

6:00 PM–8:00 PM

Rooms 9204-9206

This event is livestreamed, click here to watch the livestream:

http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/livestreams/page1/

Few figures have marked the English-language literature of our time as deeply as did Gregory Rabassa. Translator of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966), Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark (1967),Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1974), Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Macho Camacho’s Beat (1980), Luisa Valenzuela’s The Lizard’s Tail (1983), José Lezama Lima’s Paradiso (2005), and more than fifty other works from Spanish and Portuguese—and himself the author of a number of books, including his prize-winning memoir If This Be Treason (2005)— Rabassa was a beloved professor and colleague at City University of New York, where he taught at the Graduate Center and Queens College for more than forty years.

Among the numerous honors Rabassa received were the National Book Award in Translation (1967), the Gregory Kolovakos Award for career achievement from PEN American Center (2001), the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (2006), and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir (2006). “We Spanish-language writers, especially of my generation, owe him enormous gratitude for the way he helped us plant roots in the English-speaking world,” wrote Mario Vargas Llosa earlier this year.

Speakers include Edith Grossman, Peter Constantine, Earl Fitz,Ezra Fitz, Esther Allen, Mauricio Font, Elizabeth Lowe, Harry Morales, Daniel Shapiro, Nora Glickman, Declan Spring, Ammiel Alcalay, Stanley Barkan, Catarina Cordeiro, David Draper Clark, and Rabassa’s daughters Clara Rabassa and Kate Rabassa Wallen.

In addition, the 14 recipients of the 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grants, who carry forward the tradition Rabassa did so much to consolidate, will be announced and honored.

A reception will follow.

For a list of suggested readings, click here.

This event is presented as part of Translation, an interdisciplinary research group that investigates how translation might be understood as a process of transformation that deepens engagement with places, people, cultures, and languages. The group is supported by the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research. For more information or to join, email [email protected].

Co-sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages, the Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, the Translation Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research, CUNY Grad Center; the MFA in Creative Writing and Translation, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, Queens College, CUNY; PEN America; Words Without Borders; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (published by Routledge in association with The City College of New York, CUNY)The Bridge Literary Translation Series; the Instituto Cervantes of New York; and Julianne and Earl E. Fitz.

https://vimeo.com/188985795