Gregory Rabassa

Gregory Rabassa, ComM (March 9, 1922 – June 13, 2016) was an American literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English. He taught for many years at Columbia University and Queens College.

Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, to a family headed by a Cuban émigré. After serving during World War II as an OSS cryptographer, he received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University and taught there for over two decades before accepting a position at Queens College, City University of New York.

He worked primarily out of Spanish and Portuguese. He produced English-language versions of the works of several major Latin American novelists, including Julio Cortázar, Jorge Amado and Gabriel García Márquez. On the advice of Cortázar, García Márquez waited three years for Rabassa to schedule translating One Hundred Years of Solitude. He later declared Rabassa's translation to be superior to the Spanish original.

He received the PEN Translation Prize in 1977 and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 1982. Rabassa was honored with the Gregory Kolovakos Award from PEN American Center for the expansion of Hispanic Literature to an English-language audience in 2001.