Opinion Express View on Edith Grossman: The visible translator

Over the last four decades, for many English-speaking readers, the magical worlds of Latin-American writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes and Antonio Muñoz Molina came alive through the vision and renditions by Edith Grossman. The American translator, 87, who died on September 4, was known for her definitive translations of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez, among others.

Grossman came to translation when she was 36, with a short story by Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández. Unlike her contemporary, the equally feted translator Anthea Bell, who took the irascible Asterix to the English-speaking world, Grossman was not an “adherent of the school of invisible translation”. In fact, she fought for the translator’s right to be recognised — and remunerated — with their name on the book’s cover alongside the writer’s. It was a watershed moment for the translating community, whose labours had, up until then, remained largely unacknowledged. Much of the felicity that works of translations have garnered in the last decade and the steady push to recognise the translator as an artiste acting as a bridge between two cultures rest on the efforts of stalwarts such as Grossman to mainstream their creative labours.

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The act of speaking for someone requires an imagination that can make sense of both what is voiced and what remains tacit. In the introduction to her 2010 essay, Why Translation Matters, Grossman wrote, “Translation… expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.” Her work stands as a testimony to this creative alchemy.