The voice of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, she drew the world’s attention to the value of her craft
Literary translation, wrote Edith Grossman in 2010, helps us “to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight.”
Grossman, who has died aged 87, was one of the English-speaking world’s pre-eminent literary translators, and one of translation’s great champions. She built her early career on Latin American fiction, becoming the voice of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, before cementing her reputation with a highly acclaimed Don Quixote. Her slate of translatees also included Álvaro Mutis, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso and Antonio Muñoz Molina. That’s just the M’s.
Born Edith Marion Dorph, in Philadelphia in 1936, she studied Spanish at high school before majoring in the subject at the University of Pennsylvania. Her doctorate from New York University (on Nicanor Parra) was awarded in 1972, the same year she received her first translation commission: a story by the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández. For some years, she combined translation with part-time teaching at various New York colleges. She said that she just moonlighted as a translator, and her “sunlight job” was as a college instructor.
By the time she turned her focus to translation full-time in 1990, Grossman had embarked on one of her career-defining professional relationships. Gabriel García Márquez’s previous work had been translated by the brilliant Gregory Rabassa; but in the mid-1980s, Grossman was offered the job of recreating his latest. This translation was Love in the Time of Cholera (1988), and Grossman would remain García Márquez’s translator till his death 26 years later. By the mid-1990s, she had adopted Mario Vargas Llosa as her other most consistent collaborator. (He would also become her second Nobel laureate.)
It was García Márquez who called her, five books into their relationship, to say, “I hear you’re two-timing me with [Miguel de] Cervantes.” She’d first read the 17th-century novelist as a teenager, in Samuel Putnam’s (then new) translation. But having built her translation experience on contemporary Latin Americans rather than Golden-Age Iberians, when invited to write a new English Don Quixote, she apparently asked the publisher, “Do you have the right Grossman?”
Literary translations are never definitive, but if ever one came close, it was Grossman’s Quixote. Published in 2003, it was sharp-witted, sensitive, nimble, mischievous and full of life. Its translator — not incidentally — was all those things, too. Grossman often used Quixote to exemplify the chains of influence that translation could enable: Cervantes to William Faulkner to García Márquez to Salman Rushdie.
Cervantes would be followed by more Spaniards, exquisite translations ranging from Luis de Góngora’s The Solitudes to Carmen Laforet’s Nada. The former is a fiendishly complex 17th-century poem that she began to translate, unusually, without a publisher contract; the latter is blazing mid-20th-century prose. Grossman had serious range.
Through much of her career, Grossman taught literature courses and translation workshops — both regularly and occasionally — at NYU, at Columbia University, at the 92nd Street Y and beyond. She befriended and supported fellow translators; for those of us who were lucky enough to enjoy the generosity of her friendship and her wisdom, there were margaritas at the regular place around the corner, or wine in her Upper West Side apartment. (Though her youth was spent elsewhere, “Edie” seemed to have been always a New Yorker.)
A charismatic and entertaining public speaker, she was passionate about her reverence for text (she rarely researched her writers outside it), about the importance of listening and about “the enormous pleasure of delving into writing by brilliant authors”.
Grossman knew the value of her work. She fought for appropriate credit and remuneration, a battle her fellow translators continue to benefit from. The name-on-the-cover celebrity she achieved was even rarer then than it is now. In Why Translation Matters (2010), a slim, high-voltage volume, she defended translation as a necessary art, a way to expand a language and to allow writers to apprentice themselves to other writers.
Why does translation matter? Edith Grossman leaves a legacy — in her books, in her influence on students, peers and readers — to answer that question. She was married to Norman Grossman from 1965 to 1984; she is survived by two sons, and by many of her fortunate writers.
Source: Financial Times
