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> Foremost among the couriers from the Spanish and Portuguese is Rabassa, 62, who has spent the past two decades bringing Latin American literature north to the U.S. The authors he has translated constitute a pantheon of Hispanic letters: Garcia Márquez (Colombia), Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), José Lezama Lima (Cuba), Luis Rafael Sánchez (Puerto Rico), Vinicius de Moraes (Brazil).
Despite Rabassa's attachment to Latin America, he prefers to live in an English-speaking environment. Born of a Cuban father and an American mother, he has spent most of his life in the North eastern U.S. He did go to Brazil for 18 months on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in the mid-1960s, but that was long enough.
"You could become so Brazilianized, you couldn't express yourself in English," he decided. Nowadays, Rabassa works on the sun porch or in the kitchen of his Long Island home, producing a first version "as fast as I can type." He then carefully revises his draft, penciling in queries for the author.
Most of his quandaries arise from Latin American writers' love of verbal play. In A Manual for Manuel, Cortazar characterizes different types of secret policemen in a string of richly suggestive alliterative words, hormigon, hormigucho, etc. In English, a literal translation (big ant, big clumsy ant) would have been ungainly. Rabassa's solution: dominant, sycophant, miscreant.
> Weaver, 61, the preeminent interpreter of Italian prose, is a Virginian who lives and works in the Italian hill country between Arezzo and Siena. To prevent his English from becoming too Italianized, he makes yearly trips to New York City, where he consults with his most "nurturing" publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Helen Wolff. When Weaver is not translating such writers as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, he reads vast quantities of American mysteries, which he reviews for the London Financial Times. "Crime books," he maintains, "are very good at keeping you abreast of what people are saying back home."
Unlike many of his colleagues. Weaver is reluctant to consult with authors about obscurities in their books, or even to show them his work in progress, unless they have perfect command of English. He has good reasons. Five years ago, one author complained that Weaver had used the word cot instead of bed.
"Isn't that short for cottage?" the writer demanded. When Weaver began translating Morante's monumental novel History, she phoned him several times a day to ask how he had rendered certain words.
When Weaver answered, he recalls, "she would say, 'Well, it doesn't mean exactly this, but it means this, plus a little bit of that, and a hint of another thing.' When I realized that History contained 200,000 words, I decided to quit." Before he could inform Morante of his intention, she phoned, saying she had decided she could be of no help and would stop pestering him. Thus are great translations born.