Edith Grossman

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Edith Grossman is an award-winning Spanish to English literary translator. She is one of the most important translators of Latin American fiction in the past century, translating the works of Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, Mayra Montero, Augusto Monterroso, Jaime Manrique, Julián Ríos and of Alvaro Mutis.

In a speech delivered at the 2003 PEN Tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, held in New York City on November 5, 2003 She explains her method:

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

She recently completed a new translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote of which Carlos Fuentes, writing in the New York Times, commented, "Edith Grossman delivers her Quixote in plain but plentiful contemporary English....Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading a 17th-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist."

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Grossman now lives in New York City. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.