Edith Grossman

Edith Grossman in 2012

Edith Grossman (born March 22, 1936) is an American Spanish-to-English literary translator. One of the most important contemporary translators of Latin American and Spanish literature, she has translated the works of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos, Álvaro Mutis, and Miguel de Cervantes. She is a recipient of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

Early life

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Grossman now lives in New York City. She received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, did graduate work at UC Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. from New York University. Her career as a translator began when in 1972 a friend, Jo-Anne Engelbert, asked her to translate a story for a collection of short works by the Argentine avant-garde writer Macedonio Fernández. Grossman subsequently changed the focus of her work from scholarship and criticism to translation.

Method

In a speech delivered at the 2003 PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, in 2003, she explained her method:

Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.

Awards and recognition

Grossman's translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in 2003, is considered one of the finest English-language translations of the Spanish novel, by authors and critics including Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom, who called her "the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note." However, the reaction from Cervantes scholars has been more critical. Tom Lathrop, himself a translator of Don Quixote, critiqued her translation in the journal of the Cervantes Society of America, saying:

Serious students of literature in translation should consider looking elsewhere for more faithful translations, such as Starkie and the discontinued and lamented Ormsby-Douglas-Jones version. There are just too many things that just are not right, or are confusing, in this translation.

Both Lathrop and Daniel Eisenberg criticize her for a poor choice of Spanish edition as source, leading to inaccuracies; Eisenberg adds that "she is the most textually ignorant of the modern translators".

She received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation in 2006. In 2008, she received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2010, Grossman was awarded the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize for her 2008 translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes. In 2016 she received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Civil Merit awarded by the King of Spain Felipe VI.

In 1990 Gabriel García Márquez said that he prefers reading his own novels in their English translations by Grossman and Gregory Rabassa.

Selected translations

Miguel de Cervantes:

• Don Quixote, Ecco/Harper Collins, 2003.
• Exemplary Novels, Yale University Press, 2016.

Gabriel García Márquez:

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Knopf, 1988.
• The General in His Labyrinth, Penguin, 1991.
• Strange Pilgrims: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
• Of Love and Other Demons, Knopf, 1995.
• News of a Kidnapping, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
• Living to Tell the Tale, Jonathan Cape, 2003.
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Vintage, 2005.

Mario Vargas Llosa:

• Death in the Andes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
• The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• The Feast of the Goat, Picador, 2001.
• The Bad Girl, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
• In Praise of Reading and Fiction: The Nobel Lecture, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
• Dream of the Celt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
• The Discreet Hero, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
• The Neighborhood, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Ariel Dorfman:

• Last Waltz in Santiago and Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance, Penguin, 1988.
• In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land: New and Collected Poems from Two Languages, Duke University Press, 2002

Mayra Montero:

• In the Palm of Darkness, HarperCollins, 1997.
• The Messenger: A Novel, Harper Perennial, 2000.
• The Last Night I Spent With You, HarperCollins, 2000.
• The Red of His Shadow, HarperCollins, 2001.
• Dancing to "Almendra": A Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
• Captain of the Sleepers: A Novel, Picador, 2007.

Álvaro Mutis:

• The Adventures of Maqroll: Three Novellas, HarperCollins, 1992.
• The Adventures of Maqroll: Four Novellas, HarperCollins, 1995.
• The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, NYRB Classics, 2002.

Other works:

• José Luis Llovio-Menéndez, Insider: My Hidden Life as a Revolutionary in Cuba, Bantam Books, 1988.
• Augusto Monterroso, Complete Works & Other Stories, University of Texas Press, 1995.
• Julián Ríos, Loves That Bind, Knopf, 1998.
• Eliseo Alberto, Caracol Beach: A Novel, Vintage, 2001.
• Julián Ríos, Monstruary, Knopf, 2001.
• Pablo Bachelet, Gustavo Cisneros: The Pioneer, Planeta, 2004.
• Carmen Laforet, Nada: A Novel, The Modern Library, 2007.
• The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, W.W. Norton, 2007.
• Antonio Muñoz Molina, A Manuscript of Ashes, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008.
• Why Translation Matters, Yale University Press, 2010.
• Luis de Góngora, The Solitudes, Penguin, 2011.
• Carlos Rojas, The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico Garcia Lorca Ascends to Hell, Yale University Press, 2013.
• Carlos Rojas, The Valley of the Fallen, Yale University Press, 2018.

External links

• Interview in Guernica Magazine about "Don Quixote"
• Edith Grossman's lecture, "Translating Cervantes," delivered at the IDB Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.
• PEN audio interview with Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman
• Podcast Interview with Paula Shackleton BookBuffet.com