Gregory Rabassa '44 on Ramon Guthrie

AMON GUTHRIE WAS THE WHOLEST whole man I have ever known. He was a skier, he had been a pilot in the war, he was a very accomplished poet. Though he had studied law, he never got a college degree he relied on knowledge. He was part of the Lost Generation group in Paris in the twenties with Hemingway and Stein and Fitzgerald. Much later, Ramon was in the hospital, thinking he was dying of cancer. As it turned out, he didn't die then, but he wrote quite a good book while he was there, MaximumSecurity Ward.

The first book I really ever read was Marcel Proust's A la recherche dutemps perdu, and that was because Ramon Guthrie taught it in his course at Dartmouth. Ramon had a theory that Proust structured his novel on Beethoven's Fourteenth Quartet. He would play it for us at his home, then point out the different parts of the piece ("This is Balbec, this is Combray...") that he tied to the novel. He said, during one passage of the Quartet, something that I've never forgotten: "Now, right here, Beethoven is not trying to be God. Beethoven is God."

Ramon showed us that the arts that writing and music and painting are all related. He led us far beyond the printed page; his seminars were an introduction to cabbages and kings. I learned how to see and hear. And Ramon showed me how to get the most out of a book, its essence, its marrow. Everything I have read since then has been to my benefit because of that marvelous experience. If a person knows how to read, it follows that he will know how to write. Therefore I can say that my writing, too, has its origins in those fine days.

I am never sure why I am doing what I do today (writing, teaching, translating), but the way I go about it and what success I have had certainly grew out of my contact with Ramon Guthrie.

I find myself playing the Quartet a lot these days. I think of him whenever I hear it.

Gregory Rabassa

"His seminars were an introduction to cabbages and Lings."

GREGORY RABASSA, PROFESSOR at QueensCollege, is one of the world's foremost translatorsof Latin American literature, including GabrielGarcia Marquez. He won a National BookAward in 1967, and has won two PEN AmericanCenter prizes for translation.