Edith Grossman was born in Philadelphia in 1936 and died at her home in Manhattan in 2023. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Berkeley, went to Spain on a Fulbright scholarship in 1962, and finished a PhD in Latin American studies at New York University. She spent the rest of her career moving Spanish-language fiction into English, at a time when translation was seldom treated as a serious profession.
Her books are other writers' books, rendered in her English. She translated seven novels by Gabriel García Márquez, among them Love in the Time of Cholera, and she also worked with Mario Vargas Llosa, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes and Laura Esquivel. She did not think of translation as copying. In a 2003 speech she said that a translation "is not made with tracing paper," and that it is an act of critical interpretation. She also pushed publishers to print the translator's name on the cover, and she made the larger case in Why Translation Matters, published by Yale University Press in 2010.
Her Don Quixote, issued by Ecco in 2003, became one of the most admired English versions. The critic Hamilton Cain singled out its lively, talkative modern voice, with the knight's own formal speeches kept deliberately courtly. Her honors include the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and, in 2022, the Thornton Wilder Prize for Translation.
Start with Don Quixote, the edition listed here, which carries an introduction by Harold Bloom. It is long, but Grossman's version treats it first as a comic novel, and that is a good way in. If you want to see her at work on a twentieth-century voice afterward, try Love in the Time of Cholera.
