Friday 24 May at 7.00 p.m.
The London Review Bookshop is delighted to welcome the distinguished critic and translator Edith Grossman, on a rare visit to the UK where she will be in conversation with Daniel Hahn of the British Centre for Literary Translation.
Edith Grossman on translation
‘Translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time. It permits us to savour the transformation of the foreign into the familiar and for a brief time to live outside our own skin, our own preconceptions and misconceptions. It expands and deepens our world, our consciousness, in countless, indescribable ways.’
Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator, critic, and occasional teacher of literature in Spanish and has been the recipient of awards and honors including Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Grossman has brought over into English poetry, fiction, and non-fiction by major Latin American writers, including Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Álvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero. Peninsular works that she has translated include Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, novels by Julián Ríos, Carmen Laforet, Carlos Rojas, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and The Solitudes of Luis de Góngora.
Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with some thirty books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish and French include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas; and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. Forthcoming translations include work by Philippe Claudel, Eduardo Halfon and José Eduardo Agualusa. He has edited a number of reference books, and is currently compiling the new Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. His work has won him the Blue Peter Book Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.
