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Of course, no translator of the classics has a guarantee of exclusivity: in the 20 years since Walter Arndt won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his masterly version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, three publishers have brought out new translations of the same poem. Rabassa, who expects that his version of One Hundred Years of Solitude will ultimately be supplanted, believes the development is inevitable: "If you read Cervantes in Spanish today, he sounds relatively modern, but the translations of Don Quixote made by Cervantes' contemporaries seem terribly archaic." This variety of renditions has some advantages; each new translation influences readers in a fresh way. Rabassa views the process philosophically: "The Greeks have only one Homer. We have many."
The classics are not the only works subject to constant reinterpretation. Some modern books have gone through several translations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissatisfied with some of the first English versions of his works, insisted upon new ones as soon as he emigrated to the U.S. Other demanding authors, who possess a greater command of foreign tongues, have decided that self-translation is best. Nabokov, whose early work was written in Russian, rendered Laughter in the Dark into English. He also turned Lolita, which was written in English, into Russian. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who writes mostly in French, has translated his plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and others, into his native English.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, 80, used to change translators with the seasons, arguing over every article and preposition as his stories went from Yiddish to English. But recently the novelist has professed "great compassion" for the workers he once abused. "Since every language contains its own unique truths," he now believes, "translation is the very spirit of civilization." Then he adds, "In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women; lately I'm dreaming of a harem full of translators." —By Patricia Blake