Grossman: the translator as a writer

It's not unusual now to celebrate the legacy of great translators but in 2003, Edith Grossman had to demand that her name be on the cover

- Somak Ghoshal

Last month, when renowned translator Edith Grossman died at the age of 87, her obituary made headlines in leading newspapers across the world. In 2023, it's no longer unusual to celebrate the legacy of great translators. In 2018, the death of Anthea Bell, best known as the translator of Franz Kafka and the Asterix comics, also made news. And yet, as recently as 20 years ago, such adulation was rare.

Indeed, translators like Grossman fought bitterly to claim the credit they justly deserved. In 2003, when she published her English translation of Don Quixote, the 17th century Spanish classic by Miguel de Cervantes, Grossman had to demand that her publisher put her name on the cover of the book, alongside the original author's. From the vantage of our politically woke times, when the omission of a translator's name from the cover of a book is seen as a regressive anomaly rather than the norm, a demand like hers may not seem radical. But, in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as Grossman was coming into her own as a translator, the balance of justice was far from even for literary translators.

For context, by 2003, Grossman had translated works by Gabriel García Márquez, like Love In The Time of Cholera (1988), and books by Carlos Fuentes and Isabel Allende. Profoundly impressed by her rigour, Márquez publicly praised her as his "voice in English". However, the publishing industry hadn't still woken up to the role translators play to keep the business of books alive and relevant.