At the service of lenguaje language: translator Edith Grossman enters the minds of her masters, from Cervantes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to create a faithful, English voice.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Biography

"The translator is unappreciated," Valery Larbaud once wrote. "He is seated in the lowest. position; he lives so to speak on alms; he is willing to perform the humblest functions and to play the most unobtrusive parts. 'Be of service' is his motto, and he asks nothing for himself, priding himself on being faithful to his chosen masters, faithful even to the point of suppressing his own intellectual personality."

Translators are indeed the humble servants of literature, and as they try to "move across the silence between languages ... by producing a live sound that might bear a resemblance to the life of the original" (the words of W. S. Merwin), they permit readers to embrace treasures far beyond their own linguistically challenged reach. Edith Grossman is such an individual who, by way of her deft translations of masterworks from Latin America and Spain, has generously availed an English-language audience access to a remarkable trove of books both old and new.

Grossman, who lives and works in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, says she came upon her profession by accident. It was during the early 1970s, and she was teaching Spanish language and the literature of Spain and Latin America at Dominican College in upstate New York. "Ronald Christ, editor of the literary journal Review, asked me to do a translation of a story of Macedonio Fernandez, the Argentine writer so admired by Borges. I said I'm not a translator, just a critic, but he said, 'please try, I think you'll do it very well.' That turned out to be the first prose piece by Fernandez ever translated into English. I discovered that I really loved the work. I didn't know I was going to love it. I liked working at home. Back in those days I was a serious smoker, and so I was able to smoke in my own house, be in my jeans, and not be in a library, where I couldn't smoke."

"Why Spanish to begin with?" Grossman continues. "Well, I didn't like school very much, but my high school Spanish teacher really reached me. I said whatever this woman is doing l want to do. So I studied Spanish in high school and then majored in it in college. I think I have an ear for languages because I was able to speak all the ones I studied: Spanish, Italian, and French. I did seven years at the University of Pennsylvania for my BA and MA and started my doctorate, went to the University of California, Berkeley, for two years, then to Spain, and finished at New York University. My original intention was do something in the Baroque period, maybe Quevedo on Gongora or possibly medieval poetry, but when I read Neruda and Vallejo--that was out in California--I said no, I'm going to Latin America, the twentieth century, something is going on there. I did my dissertation on Nicanor Parra and his antipoetry, and that became a book [The Antipoetry of Nicanor Parra, 1975]."

"I loved translating poetry, but they used to pay fifty cents a line, seven dollars for a sonnet, so it was a hard way to make a living. But I came to conclude that translating prose is not different from poetry. It's the same track. The imagery created and the rhythms are very poetic. I continued working for Review--poems, short stories, excerpts of longer pieces, and then in the seventies I did the novel Redoble pot Rancas [Drums for Rancas, 1977], by Manuel Scorza, the Peruvian writer who died in a plane crush in 1983. By then I was building a little reputation in New York. I received a call to submit a sample for a translation of El amor en los tiempos del colera [Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988]. Gregory Rabassa had been Garcia Marquez's English-language translator for years, but he...