“I thought to stay home and translate was more fun than playing with monkeys. I didn’t have to get dressed to go to work. I could smoke all I wanted.” This was the typically tongue-in-cheek way that Edith Grossman, the pre-eminent translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, described how she started out on her career in translation.
Grossman, who has died aged 87 of pancreatic cancer, became a professional translator soon after she had completed her doctorate on the work of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1972, and was considering what she should do next. This was at a time when US publishers were beginning to bring out translations of the contemporary Latin American authors of the “boom” generation, and it was not long before “Edie”, as she was known, became the translator of choice for Gabriel García Márquez, completing her version of his 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera in 1988.
She and the Colombian author became close friends, and she once described him as “an utterly delicious man. He was very funny, with a straight-faced wit. I never knew what the expression ‘a twinkle in the eye’ meant really; I couldn’t visualise it until I met him, because his eyes did twinkle. He was very witty, very smart, very underplayed.”
Grossman went on to translate all his subsequent novels, as well as those of another Latin American Nobel laureate, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, beginning with Death in the Andes in 1996. He has said of her work: “It doesn’t seem to be a translation of a novel, but something that gives the impression that it has been written originally in English.”
As well as many other Latin American writers, including Mayra Montero, Ariel Dorfman, and Álvaro Mutis, Grossman tackled some of the classic Spanish authors, most notably Cervantes and his Don Quixote, producing a memorable version in English for the fourth centenary of its original publication in 2003. The critic Harold Bloom praised her as being “the [pianist] Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note”.
For her part, she insisted that translation was an aural/oral practice, first capturing the tonalities of the original work, and then finding a way of being able to speak something as close as possible to it in English.
She was born Edith Dorph in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (which she once called “the most boring city in the United States”) to Sarah (nee Stern), a secretary, and Alexander Dorph, a shoe salesman who later owned his own shoe store. She studied Spanish language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, spent a year in Spain as a Fulbright scholar, and gained her doctorate from New York University (NYU). She had married Norman Grossman, a musician, in 1965; the couple had two sons before their divorce in 1984.
The author whose work Grossman said she most enjoyed translating was, however, not a novelist, but the obscure 17th-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora, whose work was notoriously difficult to understand, let alone translate. She produced a version of his Solitudes (published in 2011) of which she said: “I thought, oh my God, if I can do this I can leap tall buildings in a single bound – there’s nothing I can’t do.”
Although she gave up an academic career to be a full-time translator, over the years Grossman was an inspiring teacher of Spanish and Latin American literature as well as translation at NYU and Columbia University. In 2010 she published a book of essays with her thoughts on her craft, Why Translation Matters. In it, she reflects on the importance of bringing works from another language and culture into English, stressing how this process “expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways”.
She was also insistent that the translator’s name be included on the front cover of publications, together with that of the author. In a 2019 interview for the translation website Asymptote, Grossman considered it was time that translators were no longer seen as the poor relation but as an equal partner in the production of a work in a different language: “Reviewers used to write as though translation had appeared through kind of a divine miracle. An immaculate conception!”
Her work was recognised by many awards over the years. These included: the PEN/Ralph Manheim medal for translation in 2006, the Arts and Letters award in literature in 2008, and the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute translation prize in 2010 for her translation of Antonio Muñoz Molina’s A Manuscript of Ashes. In 2016, she received the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Civil Merit from the king of Spain, Felipe VI, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her its Thornton Wilder prize for translation in 2022.
She is survived by her sons, Kory and Matthew, and a sister, Judith.
• Edith Marion Grossman, translator and lecturer, born 22 March 1936; died 4 September 2023
