Overview

"""Why Translation Matters"" argues for the cultural importance of translation, and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, 'My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented'. For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: 'Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable'. Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman's belief in the crucial significance of the translator's work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way."

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Edith Grossman, the Glenn Gould of translators, has written a superb book on the art of the literary translation. Even Walter Benjamin is surpassed by her insights into her task, which she rightly sees as imaginatively independent. This should become a classic text. - Harold Bloom

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Edith Grossman has been a professional translator since 1972, and a full time translator since 1990. Her translations of writers such as Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others, have been reviewed by major media outlets including the New York Times and The New Yorker.

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