How a quintessentially Yiddish sensibility created a thoroughly modern Don Quixote
Edith Grossman, translator of the Quixote. Photo by Kelly Writers House via Wikimedia Commons
By Benjamin Ivry September 6, 2023
Edith Grossman, the Jewish American translator who died Sept. 4 at age 87, proved that the mere sound of Yiddish can inspire reveries of transmuting one language into another.
Responsible for translating Don Quixote as well as the modern Spanish language authors Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Grossman told an interviewer in 2016 that when her parents “wanted to say things so I wouldn’t understand, they spoke in Yiddish.”
The mysterious allure of the Yiddish language as heard in childhood, she implied, opened doors for imagining further worlds of verbal expression.
Grossman eventually did acquire some Yiddish vocabulary because, as she put it, she “grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Philadelphia.” But in later years, she confessed to another journalist, it almost completely disappeared from her conscious memory.
Instead, she focused entirely on Spanish, unlike previous virtuosos of translation like Boston-born Isaac Goldberg, who translated modern Spanish writers as well as the Yiddish eminences Peretz Hirschbein, Sholem Asch and David Pinski.
Grossman was drawn to the Spanish language by Naomi Zieber, a high school Spanish teacher whom she later recalled as “such a humane woman.” Grossman added that Zieber was “serious and demanding but not rigid,” inspiring Grossman to resolve, “‘Oh, whatever [Zieber] does, I’m going to do.’”
Later an avid fan of contemporary Jewish novelists like Philip Roth and Paul Auster, Grossman honed a literary vocabulary and style in fiction that was plausible for readers of American English, no matter how exotic its origins may have been.
Of Roth, Grossman said that he recreated a “specific moment” in American history and “explore[d] it very deeply.” In this achievement, she felt, Roth was akin to García Márquez, who described his native Colombia in his works. So kvelling over Roth’s prose put Grossman in good stead for understanding the literary goals of a South American Nobel Prize winner.
To this ease in bookish transposition, Grossman added a sense of musicality and vocality. These were also precious additions to a translator’s repertoire. Grossman’s ex-husband was a musician, as are her two sons, and a poster of Aretha Franklin decorated a wall in her Upper West Side apartment as a sign of her onetime aspiration to be a blues singer.
This reverence for mellifluence surely added to the charisma and lifelike quality of her translations. Who knows what might have happened had Grossman followed in the path of other Jewish women blues singers, from Libby Holman to Elly Wininger, instead of restricting her main jazz-like improvisations to the printed page?
As it was, she retained a stage-like allure that bewitched some onlookers like the translator Jonathan Cohen, who noted that when he met her for the first time, he considered Grossman a “volcanic beauty.”
Grossman’s intense aura was appreciated by those who paid tribute to her on the occasion of her 80th birthday at an event organized by the PEN America Translation Committee. There, the publisher John Donatich commended her “almost maternal ferocity and an adventurous intelligence.”
Indeed, this free-spirited Jewish mother was like a breath of fresh air in the sometimes dry, business-minded worlds of commercial and academic publishing. Another speaker at the PEN America gathering stressed Grossman’s appreciation of pork, as if to suggest that her Jewishness did not include strict ritual observance.
Her unorthodox approach to translating classic works, such as Don Quixote, likewise raised some hackles in academia.
In November 2004, at a Hofstra University conference, Grossman freely admitted ignoring the vast scholarly bibliography surrounding Don Quixote because “a lifetime would not be enough time to read it all, and I had a two years’ contract.”
For “practical and sentimental” reasons, as she put it, she chose to use a single, outdated and already superseded edition of Don Quixote as the text she would translate from. The American Jewish Hispanist Daniel Eisenberg thought that this decision was a shanda, calling Grossman the “most textually ignorant of the modern translators” of Don Quixote.
According to another maven, Tom Lathrop of the University of Delaware, some of Grossman’s word choices were odd, such as when she referred to a “benison” received from prostitutes who helped dress Don Quixote before he departed from an inn; the more common word “favor,” as used by previous translators such as J. M. Cohen and Burton Raffel, was clearer.
Lathrop also preferred Cohen’s version of a passage in which Don Quixote simply calls someone a “boor” compared to Grossman’s more ornate word choice of “base varlet.”
Possibly further irritating the specialists, Harold Bloom contributed a quintessentially swashbuckling introduction to Grossman’s translation, not mentioning such Jewish Cervantes mavens as Eisenberg, Edward H. Friedman or Karl-Ludwig Selig.
Instead, as was usually the case with Bloom, he erupted with whatever happened to be on his mind at the time, which happened to be a lot about Shakespeare and also a number of Jewish writers, including Erich Auerbach, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Harry Levin and Marcel Proust. Although surely a distinguished bunch, their direct relevance to Cervantes might have been debatable.
Yet if Grossman’s “Quixote” seemed a trifle anti-academic in university circles, this may not have been a result of “ignorance,” as Eisenberg put it, but a deliberate aesthetic choice on her part.
In her 2010 book Why Translation Matters, Grossman cited the German Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin to the effect that translation should not simply strive for likeness to the original. Her book also quotes the American Jewish translator Ralph Manheim as stating that “translators are like actors who speak the lines as the author would if the author could speak English.”
These notions were in fact embodied in Grossman’s theatrical, freewheeling approach to translation that worked ideally with the emotional, imaginative universe of modern Latin American and Spanish fiction.
It was perhaps inevitable that with more venerable literary monuments, a degree of controversy would result from this amount of exuberant chutzpah. For Grossman’s Yiddishkeit was also evident in the sheer rabble-rousing energy with which she usually pled her causes; not coincidentally, her father had worked as a passionately motivated union organizer.
As recently as 2019, in a chat with a literary journal, she lauded her “very feisty” lawyer Neal Gatcher, who had insisted to publishers that Grossman’s name should appear on the covers of books she translated, a quite atypical prominence in the publishing industry. This star billing soon won her special status in a business where such details count.
Light-years away from the usual introverted, downtrodden, ill-paid and disrespected literary translator, Grossman was described by the The New York Times as an “earthy, tough New Yorker who was known as ‘Edie.’”
So Edie Grossman earned her place as a luminary of the literary scene with gusto and verve rooted in Yiddishkeit.
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