Chekhov’s Mistess

Meet the Translator Edith Grossman

[updated: The Guernica link is updated]

We’ll take this opportunity to offer up some background information on Edith Grossman who has translated some of the modern Spanish language masters as well as a brand new edition of “Don Quixote.” Her translation is the one I’ve chosen to read, which I will address in another post.

The publisher Harper Collins offers up a scant 50 words on Ms. Grossman, but we can look to this Guernica magazine interview, published last January, just before she began teaching at Columbia University in New York City:

“Edith Grossman is the translator of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2003), as well as Living to Tell the Tale, the first volume of Gabriel García Márquez’s three-volume memoir. Dubbed the ”Glenn Gould“ of translating by Harold Bloom, Grossman has brought Cervantes’s masterpiece into its most crisp English yet, 400 years after its original publication, and her version has been hailed by Carlos Fuentes in The New York Times as ”a major literary achievement.“




Grossman was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley and New York University. After years of teaching, she began translating fulltime, and since Love in the Time of Cholera she has translated all of García Márquez’s books, as well as works by Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Alvaro Mutis, and Julián Ríos. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and works from her spacious first-floor apartment, where she greeted me on a bitingly cold January day for a brief discussion of her work. The walls were decorated with Mayan and Aztec tapestries, prints by Picasso and Frida Kahlo, and the apartment was strewn with books on Spain, Latin America, and many of her own translations of Latin American authors, which she is rereading in preparation for a new course she will teach at Columbia University…”

Most of the interview concern’s the Quixote (and well worth reading), but biographically, Guernica asks her about some of the authors whom she has translated…

Guernica: Are you friendly with some of these writers? Do you hang out with them? For instance, García Márquez?




Edith Grossman: Well, I see him when he comes to New York. I see Mayra Montero when she comes in. I talk to Mutis from time to time. I am in touch with Julián [Ríos] from time to time. I am very fond of these people. I just don’t travel much. And lately they don’t come to New York very often, for whatever reason.




Guernica: What’s your impression of Gabriel García Márquez as a personality?




Edith Grossman: He’s terrific. He’s very funny, and very charming.




Guernica: He’s funny?




Edith Grossman: Yes. For instance, when he found out I was translating Cervantes he said to me, “I hear you’re two-timing me with Miguel.”

And about her own writing:

Guernica: Aside from translating others, do you write?




Edith Grossman: I’m a closet poet. I’ve only had one poem published. I try to write fiction but every time I try I hack away at it and it turns into a poem or something other than fiction. I keep editing and cutting away until it turns into something else. I do write papers and articles, that kind of stuff.

For no reason other than curiosity, I looked up the course she is teaching at Columbia on the Labyrinth Bookstore site, which offers textbooks for the CU students. As far as I can tell, she is teaching a writing course, which Labyrinth designates as “Writers You Should Know About.” The books she requires are Mutis’s “The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll,” Garcia Márquez’s “The General in His Labyrinth” and his autobiography “Living to Tell the Tale,” Rios’ “Loves that Bind,” and Montero’s “The Red of His Shadow” and “Messenger.”

If we havn’t taken this too far already, Grossman’s alma mater, University of Pennsylvania, has even more information on her life:

“Edith Grossman, CW’57, G’59, is probably the foremost translator of current Spanish- language literature. The 67-year-old New Yorker has rendered into English more than 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most notably works by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, in addition to writers of the Latin American literary boom of the ’60s and ’70s.




Grossman grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of Philadelphia.  Her father was a salesman and small businessman, and her mother kept house for the most part. ”Neither one of them had gone to college,“ she says, ”so my sisters and I were the first.“ She went to Girls High, the city’s best public school for girls at the time, and on a scholarship enrolled at Penn, where she majored in Spanish.




Her career as a translator began as an undergraduate with the poems of Juan Ramón Jimónez. She remarks, ”He writes very beautiful, very lyrical poems….They were the first translations I ever did, and they were published in the university literary magazine.“




In 1963, she spent a year in Spain on a Fulbright scholarship.  Then she finished a doctorate in Latin American literature at NYU and moved on to a career as a university professor.




Her first professional job in translation came by way of a friend at the end of the ’60s. Literary magazine editor ”Ronald Christ asked me to do a translation of


a story by the Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández,“ she recalls. ”I enjoyed getting so deep inside a text that I could recreate it, and I enjoyed working at home. From then on, I began to do more and more translation.“




Then in the late ’80s, Grossman was asked if she would submit a sample for a new novel by García Márquez. In classic Grossman fashion she responded, ”What, are you kidding? Of course I would be interested.“ The book turned out to be Love in the Time of Cholera.  It was with this breakthrough translation that her reputation began to build, and she left teaching in 1990 to work full time as a translator.




Grossman’s account of translating García Márquez for the first time is illuminating of her work and future career. ”I thought of a generalized 19th-century realistic-novel voice by way of Faulkner. Faulkner is…very Spanish in the way the sentences flow and their dependent clauses.“ She continues, ”It’s as if Hemingway had never walked the earth. I put Hemingway’s impulse to abbreviate and write very tersely aside and used polysyllabic words, and I did not use contractions. I just let it be a little old-fashioned in its flow, and it seemed to work.“




Grossman has strong thoughts about being a translator and about translation itself. On the state of translation she is blunt: ”The United States publishes fewer translations than any industrialized country…. The publishers say there is no readership for them—the readers are turned off by translations. I suppose they know what they’re talking about, but I wonder if readers are turned off. A good number of people will read or listen to what’s available and if publishers deny them translations, then there won’t be a demand for them.“




On the creative requirements of translating she says, ”Thinking up characters and plot is not a problem translators have to face, but the imagination of language and how one says what one needs to say in the best way possible—the most effective way possible—that’s a problem that translators have to deal with constantly.“




The impression you’re left with is a refreshing directness mixed with deep appreciation and intimate knowledge of the writing and the authors she has translated.”

comments

That’s really interesting that she drew on Faulkner in translating García Márquez, since Faulkner was such a huge influence on him in the first place.

Great post!

    – amcorrea (03/15  at  05:00 PM)

I think translation is one of the most fascinating topics in literature and her comments capture just why it is so interesting. It’s scary how much she has to bring to the text - it really is hers in a way. I also imagine that it must be gratifying for her to finally translate a dead author (not to be morose), so that she will get her credit due. Most all of the Quixote events I see, include her.

    – Bud Parr (03/15  at  10:58 PM)

It’s gratifying for beginning translators like myself to see how the profile of the profession is rising, thanks to translators like Dr. Grossman.  The Writer’s Market is chocked full of places to publish translations from Spanish into English.  It remains a mystery (to me) what Spanish-language literary magazines out there publish works from English into Spanish.

    – Kevin Brown (04/29  at  02:28 PM)

Hi May I please have some help with this one question? I know Don Quixote is the first and the greatest modern novel but WHY is it? Very few reviews state the reasons for its being the greatest novel.  Its scope? Subject matter? Both? Thanks very much Dave Bruce dcb188@uid.onemain.com

    – Davis C. Bruce (01/20  at  09:47 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: March 10, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:4
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