Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edith Grossman

Latin American Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) famously said that he preferred his novels in English translation by Gregory Rabassa (who visited the Writers Institute in 2006) and Edith Grossman (who will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, September 23, 2014).

Here is an excerpt from Edith Grossman's speech about translating Marquez at the 2003 PEN Tribute to the late Columbian author (1927-2014) whose work had a transformative impact on global literature:

"Ralph Maheim, the great translator from the German, compared the translator to an actor who speaks as the author would if the author spoke English. A sophisticated and provocative analogy, for it takes into account something that is not always as clear as it should be, at least to many reviewers, whose highest endorsement for a translation tends to be that it is “seamless.” If I may attempt to translate the damnation barely concealed in their faint praise, I think they really mean that the translator has, with proper humility, made herself or himself “invisible,” a punishing goal that is desirable only if we are held personally responsible for the Tower of Babel and all its dire consequences for our species."

Full text here: http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_PEN_grossman.html

More about Grossman's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/grossman_edith14.html

Complete schedule of events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.VBBgU1_D_s0

Read More......

Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014)

The New York Times obituary:

Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose “One Hundred Years of Solitude” established him as a giant of 20th-century literature, died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He was 87.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” would sell tens of millions of copies. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”

More in the New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0

Read More......