Dr. Gregory Rabassa, a world-renowned translator and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Queens College and the Graduate Center, passed away on June 16th, 2016. Join the Center for the Humanities and the PhD Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures and Languages as we celebrate Professor Rabassa’s life and work with readings and a discussion on October 21, 2016.

This event is free and open to the public.

The following information has been provided by the Center for the Humanities. Read more about the event and the participants here.

Gregory Rabassa (1922-2016), A Celebration

Reading and Conversation

About the event

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, Ilan Stavans, 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.

A reception will follow.

This event is 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, at the Graduate Center, CUNY; 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.