“I thought to stay home and translate was more fun than playing with monkeys. I didn’t have to get dressed to go to work. I could smoke all I wanted.” This was the typically tongue-in-cheek way that Edith Grossman, the pre-eminent translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, described how she started out on her career in translation.
Grossman, who has died aged 87 of pancreatic cancer, became a professional translator soon after she had completed her doctorate on the work of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1972, and was considering what she should do next. This was at a time when US publishers were beginning to bring out translations of the contemporary Latin American authors of the “boom” generation, and it was not long before “Edie”, as she was known, became the translator of choice for Gabriel García Márquez, completing her version of his 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera in 1988.
