Gregory Rabassa's National Medal of the Arts

My amigo the brilliant and prolific translator Harry Morales recently called me from New York--- news is (I hadn't heard), at the end of last year, Gregory Rabassa was awarded the 2006 National Medal of the Arts. One of the greatest literary translators of Latin American literature, Rabassa is the translator of Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and author of a memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents. Harry tells me this is the first time the National Medal of the Arts was awarded to a translator. Read more on the CUNY newswire.