Edith Grossman, whose acclaimed translations of “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez and “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes raised the profile of the often-overlooked role of the translator, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, her son Kory Grossman said.
An earthy, tough New Yorker who was known as “Edie,” Dr. Grossman dedicated herself to translating Latin American and Spanish authors at a time when literary translation was not considered a serious academic discipline or career.
Translators had long been seen as the “humble Cinderella” of publishing, she said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. But as she wrote in her groundbreaking book “Why Translation Matters” (2010), she saw the role “not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world, but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers.”
Dr. Grossman was among the first to insist that on any book she translated, her name appear on the cover along with that of the author, a practice that publishers had traditionally resisted for both financial and marketing reasons. They liked to think that they could wave “a magic wand” and turn a book from one language into another, she joked in the interview. “And no human is involved. No human who needs to be paid?”
When her translation of “Don Quixote” appeared in 2003 — with her name on the cover along with that of Cervantes — it elevated not only her own career but also helped raise the stature of literary translation. Her “Don Quixote,” published by a HarperCollins imprint, became widely admired as the definitive English version, and she went on to inspire a new generation of translators.
“Though there have been many valuable translations of ‘Don Quixote,’’ the critic Harold Bloom wrote in an introduction, “I would commend Edith Grossman’s version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose.”
Getting her name on the cover was just one issue that Dr. Grossman had with publishers. She also wanted them to commission translations of more books and accused them of “linguistic isolationism” for not doing so.
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