Edith Grossman, whose critically acclaimed translations of “Love in the Time of Cholera” Through Gabriel García Márquez and “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes highlighted the oft-overlooked role of the translator, who passed away Monday at her Manhattan home. She was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, her son Kory Grossman said.
An earthy, tough New Yorker known as “Edie,” Dr. Grossman turned to translating Latin American and Spanish authors at a time when literary translation was not considered a serious academic discipline or career.
Translators have long been seen as the “humble Cinderella” of publishing, she said in an interview for this 2021 obituary. But as she wrote in her seminal book “Why Translation Matters” (2010), she saw the role “not as the weary companion of the publishing world, but as a living bridge between two domains of discourse, two domains of experience and two groups of readers.”
Dr. Grossman was one of the first to insist that every book she translated should have her name appear on the cover along with the author’s, a practice that publishers had traditionally resisted for both financial and marketing reasons. They liked to think 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. Not a person to be paid?”
When her translation of ‘Don Quixote’ appeared in 2003—with her name on the cover, along with Cervantes’s—it not only elevated her own career, but helped elevate the status of literary translations. Her “Don Quixote,” published by a HarperCollins publishing house, was widely admired as the definitive English version, and went on to inspire a new generation of translators.
“While there have been many valuable translations of ‘Don Quixote,’ wrote critic Harold Bloom in an introduction, ‘I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinary quality of her prose.’
Getting her name on the cover was just one problem Dr. Grossman had with publishers. She also wanted them to commission translations of more books, accusing them of “linguistic isolationism” for not doing so.
Not only did they not pay the translators adequately, she said, but she said they also ignored a global conversation that builds mutual understanding through the exchange of ideas, culture and a shared love of literature.
Dr. Grossman believed that translation was a creative act undertaken in harmony with the author, as an actor enunciates a playwright’s lines. This view of translation reflected her own method, which she described as an auditory process.
“I think of the author’s voice and the sound of the text, then my obligation to hear both clearly and deeply,” she wrote in “Why Translation Matters,” “and finally my equally urgent need to to speak the voice in a second language.”
Her technique made her one of the most sought-after translators of Latin American literature in the 1980s and 1990s. She was one of those who gave English-language readers access to the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Laura Esquivel, and others who wrote in an entirely new genre known as magical realism.
Dr. Grossman became Mr. García Márquez’s translator of choice after an agent who lived in her building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side asked her one day, “Would you be interested in translating García Márquez?”
“Are you joking?” she remembered responding.
She submitted a 20-page sample of how she would translate Mr. García Márquez’s masterpiece, “Love in the Time of Cholera,” originally published in Colombia in 1985, thus beginning her lifelong collaboration with him, a Nobel laureate. author whose work she both liked exciting and challenging. Her English version was published in 1988 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Translating him, she said in the interview, “was like doing an intense crossword puzzle.”
He later gave her the ultimate compliment, telling her, “You are my voice in English.”
Dr. Grossman was born Edith Marion Dorph was born in Philadelphia on March 22, 1936. Her father, Alexander Dorph, was a shoe salesman and union organizer who eventually owned his own shoe store. Her mother, Sarah (Stern) Dorph, was a secretary and housewife.
It was Edith’s high school Spanish teacher, Naomi Zieber, who inspired her to study Spanish at the University of Pennsylvania, and she began translation as a student.
She received her bachelor’s degree in Spanish language from Penn in 1957 and her master’s degree in Spanish literature in 1959. In 1962 she spent a year in Spain as a Fulbright scholar and two years at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to New York. York received her doctorate in Latin American literature from New York University in 1972.
When dr. Grossman was a graduate student at the start of her teaching career, she encountered a bias against women in academia.
“I had a professor who once said to me, ‘You know you’re taking up the space of someone who’s going to go further 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 don’t know what I’m going to do.'”
But her phone kept ringing with the translation work, and in the 1970s she decided to leave the academic track behind and start translating full-time.
“What you lose in financial security, you gain in intellectual independence,” she said in the 2021 interview.
The gamble paid off. As her reputation grew, Dr. Grossman held part-time teaching positions at NYU, Columbia University, and other New York-area colleges, but spent most of her career as a translator.
It took two years to translate ‘Don Quixote’, but she got immense satisfaction from it. “Going to the 17th century with Cervantes was like going there with Shakespeare,” she said. “Pure joy.”
Among the many awards and honors of Dr. Grossman awards include the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation; the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Civil Merit, awarded by King Felipe VI of Spain.
Her marriage to Norman Grossman, a musician, in 1965 ended in divorce in 1984. Besides her son Kory, she is survived by another son, Matthew, and a sister, Judith Ahrens.
Despite her international reputation, Dr. Grossman hated to travel. But she had a close relationship with the authors she translated and regularly spoke to them by phone. Her authors knew how devoted she was to them, just as they were to her.
It was a sign of that dedication that one day, while she was engrossed in translating Don Quixote, the phone rang. It was Mr. García Márquez, who sounded like a jealous husband. “I hear,” he said, “you’re timing me with Cervantes.”
Alex Traub reporting contributed.
