Gabriel García Márquez remembered by Edith Grossman

6 March 1927-17 April 2014
Edith Grossman, who translated seven of Gabriel García Márquez’s books, recalls a giant of literature and an ‘utterly delicious’ man

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An agent I knew called me one day and said: “Would you be interested in translating García Márquez?”, and I said: “Are you kidding me? Of course I would.” It was for Love in the Time of Cholera and I sent in a 20-page sample. I thought about it long and hard, as you would imagine, because there are as many ways to translate a text as there are translators.

I thought about what style of English I was going to use and apparently made the right choice. He did have one comment, which came by way of his agent, Carmen Balcells in Barcelona, and that was that in Spanish he didn’t use adverbs – that is words that in Spanish end in “mente”; the equivalent in English would be “ly”. His request was that I eliminate all of those from the translation. It’s very hard to figure out how to say “slowly” without the “ly”! So you find strange phrases like “without haste” in the books because I’m avoiding “ly”. It was like being back in school, having a very strict composition teacher. But also, I thought, he must be a damn good writer to be so aware of what he’s putting into his writing.