A good literary translator is like the Invisible Man: We know he’s there by the bandages that swathe his unseen skull or that handless and footless suit that gives his phantom form a contour. But his own unmistakable traits – his particular smile, his idiosyncrasies of gesture, his gait – remain submerged within those of some other self, however alien or remote – a medieval Sanskrit poet or a Brazilian economist. And because a skilled translator never simply transposes one foreign word into an equivalent English word but feels the text through, as though he or she were writing it freshly, a strange self-abrogation takes place that must be as liberating as it is confining. The confinement is obvious; the text is given and not to be betrayed. The liberation arises from the opportunity to wriggle into another skin so seamlessly as to become indistinguishable – or nearly so – from the original.

So much for the mystical view of translation. What I’ve just written has to be set against the sheer painstaking drudgery of the task, a lexical slog lightened only by the occasional felicitous surprise. In my own limited experience, I have all too often wished I could resuscitate a long-dead author only to kill him again with my own bare hands. What on earth was he thinking of? Did he doze off here? Did his quill run dry? When we read – especially when it’s a great book – we pass over the sloppy phrase, the unfinished thought, the sudden non sequitur, and supply the correction almost without pausing and with even a smug pleasure in our own astuteness. But for a translator, each such glitch becomes a bramble of alternatives, each of which promises to scar. Homer nods; his translator may not.

Translators’ memoirs are all too rare. Invisibility has its obligations, I suppose. This lack is a shame; translation is the most difficult, and the most mysterious, of arts. We can trace some of Edward Fitzgerald’s travails with Persian through his letters; both Dante Gabriel Rossetti (whom Ezra Pound called his “mother and father” in matters of translation from Italian) and Ezra Pound himself have left illuminating comments on the process. In her letters, Marianne Moore some times mentions the exquisite decisions she faced during the 10-year labor on her (sadly unappreciated) version of La Fontaine’s “Fables” – a masterpiece of translation in my view. Edward Seidensticker’s fascinating “Genji Days,” which recounts his experience of rendering the medieval Japanese of Lady Murasaki into English, is the finest recent example I know.

Now, luckily for us, Gregory Rabassa, the incomparable translator from Spanish and Portuguese, has published his own account of his long career under the title “If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents, a Memoir” (New Directions, 189 pages, $21.95). The title sounds a bit sinister but refers to the hoary old Italian proverb “Traduttore, traditore” (“Translator, Traitor”), an almost obligatory tag in such discussions (but which probably deserves to be retired by now).

Mr. Rabassa is justly celebrated for his classic versions of Julio Cortazar’s “Hopscotch” (his first translation, which won him the 1966 National Book Award) and of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” but over the years he has produced exceptional translations of dozens of other Spanish and Latin American authors. Along with Ralph Mannheim, Edith Grossman, and a very few others, he is that rarest of creatures, a great translator who is also a subtle artist. Mr. Garcia Marquez has gone so far as to claim (he is, of course, a stranger to exaggeration) that Mr. Rabassa’s translation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” surpasses the Spanish original. On this, Mr. Rabassa says, with mischievous modesty, “I can only humbly assume that the credit lies with the English language, that the book should have been written in English and I was only trying to correct that mistake.”

As a memoirist, Mr. Rabassa has a winning manner. He may be humble before a text, but he is hardly meek. He takes regular jabs at the looming figure he calls “Professor Horrendo” and deftly rebuts “the pedantic pecking of cocksure commentators.” He accomplishes this by patiently explaining his choices. Why “solitude” (for soledad), why “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” when the Spanish would seem to de mand “Chronicle of an Announced Death”? In these, and a dozen other instances, he displays a finesse and subtlety of ear worthy of a poet. He is well aware that “solitude” does not necessarily connote “loneliness” (as it does in Spanish); but “One Hundred Years of Loneliness” doesn’t quite cut it, while “announced death” is both cumbersome and ugly. His discussion of the famous opening sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and of the choices he made, and why, is alone worth the price of the book. Aspiring translators, not to mention students of Spanish, will learn more here than in a year of language labs.

The book is arranged curiously. The first part offers a brisk summary of Mr. Rabassa’s life (he grew up in Yonkers and though his father was Cuban, he never learned Spanish at home). The second part is arranged according to the authors he has translated; the closing section, a mere page or so, provides a quirky valedictory. One of the recurrent themes is that of listening. On the evidence, Mr. Rabassa would seem to be, first and foremost, an unusually gifted listener, not only to what people say but to how they say it. As a boy, he practiced identifying and mimicking bird calls in the woods; as he grew, he found himself to be acutely sensitive to different accents, intonations, and timbres in the voices around him. He tells us, for example, that later, when translating the dialogue of a Cuban character in a novel, he could recall the rhythm of his father’s friends’ voices in the kitchen of his childhood. When we read the magical opening sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” – it seems always to have existed, in precisely those words, in our own English tongue. And yet, each word, from “firing squad” to “remember” to “distant” to “discover” had to be struggled for, thought through, and tasted by a translator who knew in his marrow that the passage from one language into another depends not solely on linguistic mastery and a sense of good prose, but on the ability to listen for those secret interstices where all our voices coincide.