“In Other Words…That’s What She Does”

Translator Edith Grossman’s job was made doubly hard by the years of scholarship built up around Cervantes’s classic work.This article entitled “In other words…that’s what she does” by Lewis Beale  appeared in the November 30, 2003 edition of the Los Angeles Times:

Sure, translating Don Quixote was a daunting task. But Edith Grossman claims it wasn’t the language that was the problem; it was the four centuries of historical baggage that came with Miguel de Cervantes’ classic picaresque novel.

“The perils and pitfalls involved in translating the book are in the 400 years of scholarship that exists,” Grossman says. “It was somewhat overwhelming to take this book on and confront the person a friend once called, ‘Professor Horrendo,’ the person who is waiting to find the mistake, the place you slipped up.”

Grossman needn’t have worried. Her fluid work with Don Quixote has earned unanimous praise, and the book is already in its third printing — an astonishing feat from a 930-page novel written in the early seventeenth-century.

Coupled with Grossman’s graceful and poetic translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s autobiographical Living to Tell the Tale, the Upper West side resident has now established herself as one of the finest and most high profile translators in publishing.

As Grossman might see it, that’s damning her with faint praise. “Translation is very solitary work,” she says, “and there is a great reluctance in the U.S. to publish translations. Very occasionally, in the case of Quixote, or when Seamus Heaney translated Beowulf, a translation makes a huge impact. But most of the time we don’t. I struggle to get my name on the cover.”

Grossman, who has also translated García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as well as the work of Mario Vargas Llosa, Alvaro Mutis and other Spanish-language writers, is a Philadelphian who earned a doctorate in Latin American literature from New York University.

When García Márquez’s previous translator, Gregory Rabassa, was unavailable to do Cholera in the 1980s, Grossman was working as a college teacher and translating poetry and short stories for a literary magazine. She beat out several peers and was chosen to translate the work, establishing her reputation.

“A lot of translation has to do with how much English you know,” she says. “When I started on Cholera it seemed to me that the echo behind García Márquez’s writing, and the echo behind almost everyone who writes in Spanish, is Cervantes. But in English there isn’t a model in prose that operates in the way Cervantes does in Spanish. So I decided to use a kind of a nineteenth-century voice by way of William Faulkner.

“I didn’t use any contractions in the narration, and I used Latinate words, polysyllabic words, instead of German monosyllables. Any time I could, I chose a longer word rather than a shorter word, as if Hemingway had never lived.”

Grossman believes that translation is thirty percent “grunt work” and seventy percent artistic. There’s a long, involved process of drafts, revisions and editing, which means that an average 300-page book can go through ten revisions and take four months of seven-day weeks to finish. (Quixote took two years, but Grossman translated another book in between.)

But the really exciting and most creative part is what Grossman describes as “trying to get into the mind of the author through the text. You have to figure out what the author really meant.”

Sometimes this means referring to the six Spanish-language dictionaries she has in her apartment. Sometimes conferring with Latino friends, U.N. translators, native speakers familiar with regional speech or the author.

Grossman doesn’t consult with an author during the translation process, but if there are still problems at the end, she’ll ask the writer “what was meant. I never ask for a translation; I ask what the word means.”

And although she has a personal relationship with her authors — she will, for example, have coffee with García Márquez if he’s in town — not all of them are interested in seeing the translation before it goes into print.

But Spanish author Julian Rios, who is fluent in English, always vets his work, and because “he is a very complex writer,” Grossman says, “I’m glad he wants to see the manuscript before I submit it to the publisher.”

When Grossman was starting out in the 1970s, she and other translators were making what could be called slave wages: $45 for a 1,000-word story, 50 cents a line for poetry (that’s a whopping $7 for a sonnet).

But fees have slowly gone up, she says, and Grossman is not only able to make a living solely as a translator now, but her status is such that she also earns royalties.

Still, translating is more about love than money. Grossman was initially attracted to the field because it allowed her to work at home (she was a heavy smoker at the time and couldn’t work in libraries) and also because “it was a way of satisfying my desire to write. I had written intermittently, and translating is a way to get past the blank page.”

But the opportunities aren’t plentiful. “Who knows which is the egg or the chicken?” Grossman says. “Do Americans read fewer translations because the publishers publish fewer, or the publisher puts out fewer translations because the public reads fewer?”

Whatever the case, demand is limited. “Philip Roth once said there are only 4,000 readers in the U.S., and once you’ve sold a book to each one of them, you’re done, that’s the end of it. He was exaggerating, but basically that’s the situation… and translated literature doesn’t do better than English-language literature.”

But there’s a missionary aspect to what she does that surpasses sales figures.

“The more attention that’s paid to translating, the better it is for all translators,” she says. “There is so much literature in the world, so much we deprive ourselves of. Translation is so important to our experience of the world.”

“In Other Words…That’s What She Does” by Lewis Beale. Copyright © 2003, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission. From Don Quixote. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. copyright © 2003 by Edith Grossman. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.