Obituaries

Edith Grossman obituary: Acclaimed translator of Gabriel García Márquez and Cervantes

The tough New Yorker also brought Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes and Laura Esquivel to the Anglosphere

Edith Grossman. Photograph: Kelly Writers House/Creative Commons

Sat Sep 9 2023 - 00:26

Born March 22nd, 1936

Died September 4th, 2023

Edith Grossman, whose acclaimed translations of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes raised the profile of the often-overlooked role of the translator, died aged 87.

Grossman, an earthy, tough New Yorker who was known as Edie, dedicated herself to translating Latin American and Spanish authors at a time when literary translation was not considered a serious academic discipline or career.

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Translators had long been seen as the “humble Cinderella” of publishing, she said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. But as she wrote in her groundbreaking book Why Translation Matters (2010), she saw the role “not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world, but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers”.

[ Review: I’m Not Here to Give a Speech, by Gabriel García Márquez ]

Grossman was among the first to insist that on any book she translated, her name appear on the cover along with that of the author, a practice that publishers had traditionally resisted for both financial and marketing reasons. They liked to think that they could wave “a magic wand” and turn a book from one language into another, she joked in the interview. “And no human is involved. No human who needs to be paid?”

When her translation of Don Quixote appeared in 2003 – with her name on the cover along with that of Cervantes – it elevated not only her own career but also helped raise the stature of literary translation. Her Don Quixote, published by a HarperCollins imprint, became widely admired as the definitive English version, and she went on to inspire a new generation of translators.

“Though there have been many valuable translations of Don Quixote,” critic Harold Bloom wrote in an introduction, “I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose.”

Grossman believed that translation was a creative act undertaken in harmony with the author, the way an actor speaks the lines of a playwright. This view of translation reflected her own method, which she described as an auditory process.

García Márquez paid her the ultimate compliment, telling her “You are my voice in English”

Her technique helped make her one of the most sought-after translators of Latin-American literature in the 1980s and 1990s. She was among those who gave English-language readers access to the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel and others who were writing in an entirely new genre known as magical realism.

Grossman became García Márquez’s preferred translator.

Translating him, she said in the interview, “was like doing an intense crossword puzzle”. He later paid her the ultimate compliment, telling her, “You are my voice in English.”

Grossman was born Edith Marion Dorph in Philadelphia. Her father, Alexander Dorph, was a shoe salesman and union organiser who eventually owned his own shoe shop. Her mother, Sarah (Stern) Dorph, was a secretary and homemaker.

She received her bachelor’s degree in Spanish language from Penn in 1957 and her master’s in Spanish literature in 1959.

“Going to the 17th century with Cervantes was like going there with Shakespeare. Sheer joy”

—  Edith Grossman

While a graduate student at the start of her teaching career, Grossman encountered a bias against women in academia. “I had a professor who once said to me: ‘You know you’re taking the space of somebody who’s going to go on in the field, and you’re just going to get married and have kids,’” she recalled to the online magazine Asymptote in 2019. She added, “I told him, ‘You have no way of knowing what I am going to do.’”

Her phone kept ringing with translation work, and by the 1970s she decided to step away from the academic track and try translating full time.

It took two years to translate Don Quixote, but she derived enormous satisfaction from it. “Going to the 17th century with Cervantes was like going there with Shakespeare,” she said. “Sheer joy.”

Her marriage to Norman Grossman, a musician, in 1965 ended in divorce in 1984. She is survived by sons Kory and Matthew, and a sister, Judith Ahrens.

A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times

2023 The New York Times Company

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