Gabriel García Márquez

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Interview

Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'

This article is more than 10 years oldSusanna Rustin

Translator Edith Grossman believes Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the great novels of the 20th century

Susanna Rustin

Saturday 26 April 2026

Gabriel García Márquez in 1975.
 Photograph by Colita

Gabriel García Márquez: 'I felt close to him immediately'

By Susanna Rustin

BIOGRAPHY

Translator Edith Grossman believes Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the great novels of the 20th century

1 When did you first read Gabriel García Márquez and what were your impressions?

I first read García Márquez in graduate school. The novel was Cien años de soledad[One Hundred Years of Solitude], and I was overwhelmed. There hasn't been a novel, before or since, quite like that one.

2 García Márquez famously liked his novels in English, but what are those of us who have never read the Spanish originals missing?

My sincere hope is that those of you who don't read Spanish aren't missing too much.

3 Which of his books do you like most, and why?

I can't answer that question. I love everything of his that I've read, though Love in the Time of Cholera occupies a special place for me since it was the first of his books that I translated. I believe it's one of the great novels of the 20th century, in any language.

4 Do you have some favourite sentences or passages from your translations and can you explain how you arrived at your choice of words?

I don't think I can answer this one either, though I'm very fond of the last words of Cholera. When the riverboat captain asks how long they intend to travel up and down the river, the reply is "Forever."

5 Were there any books or sections of his books you struggled with?

Translating is always a struggle, regardless of the author you're translating. You have to hear the original voice in a profound way, and then find the voice in English that best reflects that original. It's always difficult, challenging and immensely enjoyable.

6 Do you know Gregory Rabassa and did you ever compare notes?

Yes, I've known Gregory Rabassa for some years, but we've never compared notes in terms of translating García Márquez, other than to agree that we both dislike the term "magical realism".

7 You must be more familiar with García Márquez's prose than almost anyone. How do you think it changed over the two decades you translated him?

I think his writing may have become more intense and more concise as he aged. He always went straight to the heart of the matter, but his later writing may have been sparer, perhaps more direct.

8 How well did you know him personally and what was your relationship like?

I saw him a few times in New York. I believe the first time was at a lunch with our editor at Knopf, and the last time was for late-afternoon coffee. He was charming and intelligent and had a sly sense of humour. I felt close to him immediately.

9 How would you sum up his literary achievements?

He was a great writer, one of the most important of the 20th century, and he had a huge influence on writers all over the world. I can't, for example, imagine Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie without García Márquez.

10 What are your top 10 novels in Spanish and who are the writers you would recommend to García Márquez fans who haven't kept up with more recent Latin American fiction?

I can't name the top 10 writers in any language, but I'd suggest going back to Cervantes, who is the godfather of every writer in Spanish since the 17th century. A younger writer I like very much is Santiago Roncagliolo, a Peruvian who currently lives in Barcelona. I translated his Red April, which won the Independent foreign fiction prize a couple of years ago.

THE GUARDIAN

Gabriel García Márquez remembered by Edith Grossman

Gabriel García Márquez
Poster by Triunfo Arciniegas

Gabriel García Márquez remembered 

by Edith Grossman

BIOGRAPHY

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

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.

When I got to know him, I found him an utterly delicious man. He was very funny, with a straight-faced wit. I never knew what the expression “a twinkle in the eye” meant really; I couldn’t visualise it until I met him, because his eyes did twinkle. He was very witty, very smart, very underplayed. A very attractive person. We talked mostly about literature, a little bit of gossip. He would talk about Woody Allen, whose movies he admired. At the beginning of the 00s, I was terrified and excited at the prospect of translating Don Quixote and mentioned it in a note to him. I needed to talk to him so his secretary got on the phone and said: “Please hold for Mr García Márquez” and his first words to me were: “So I hear you’re two-timing me with Cervantes.” When I finished laughing we got down to business. I could see that twinkle in his eye all the way from Mexico City.

He had a simplicity of manners that was very charming. He would say nice things like “you’re my voice in English” and I just melted.

The last time I saw him was a while ago because he got sick and when he came here it was to Los Angeles, where one of his sons lives. He was seeing American doctors. So his travels to the US were to the west coast, and not New York, where I am.

I was really grief-stricken when he died. I felt as if the world were a smaller, darker place without him. It followed very soon after the death of [fellow Colombian writer] Alvaro Mutis, who died the previous September, and I translated his writing too. They were very close friends. Each other’s first readers. To lose Mutis and then García Márquez, I really felt very sad.

I recently reread Love in the Time of Cholera. It’s one of the great love stories. I’ve just finished teaching it and I thought, Oh my god! Imagine writing this. Just fabulous. In my opinion, he was one of the great novelists of the 20th century – right up there with Joyce, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner. I can’t imagine Toni Morrison writing without García Márquez; I can’t imagine Salman Rushdie writing without him. We should remember him with joy. And with the immense respect that genius deserves.

THE GUARDIAN

BIOGRAPHY OF GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Edith Grossman / Jaime Manrique

Jaime Manrique

by Edith Grossman

BOMB 121/Fall 2012

I first met Jaime Manrique roughly 30 years ago, and we’ve been friends ever since. I’m not sure I remember the precise circumstances. I think we both attended a poetry workshop run by Enrique Lihn, the late Chilean poet, at the Americas Society, though Jaime remembers our meeting as we danced to salsa at somebody’s party. Regardless, I was attracted by Jaime’s good-natured charm, sharp intelligence, and poetic talent, and after all these years, I still find those qualities extremely appealing.

He was always very kind to my son, Matt, who was a little boy when Jaime and I became friends and has always adored him. As a matter of fact, Matt met Terry Marks, the woman he eventually married, at a party given for Jaime by his late partner, Bill Sullivan. I’ve always cherished that connection between my son and a dear friend.

Our friendship has not been exclusively sentimental. I’ve also had the professional pleasure of translating a good number of his poems. An aspect of his poetic writing that I admire very much is his use of ordinary, colloquial language to create images of great beauty. An example is his short memory poem called “Mambo,” in which he remembers his aunts dancing the mambo “wearing their spike-heeled shoes, / lowcut dresses and wide swirling skirts; / their long obsidian hairdos / in the style of the time.” I’d venture to say that this quality may well be the effect of a profound and on-going North American influence on his poetry. One thinks immediately of William Carlos Williams, for example, or even Jaime’s beloved Emily Dickinson. Of course there are colloquial, imagistic poets in Spanish—Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda immediately come to mind—but it occurs to me that this may be an area that reveals the significant effect of the English language on Jaime’s work, even though he normally composes his poems in Spanish.

His novels, however, are written in English, and tend to have a larger historical focus, while his poetry narrows the point of view to a deeply personal one. Jaime’s fiction is meticulously researched and wonderfully revelatory of persons and events. His latest, Cervantes Street, explores the world of the man who despised Miguel de Cervantes and wrote a “continuation” of part one of Don Quixote before Cervantes could publish part two. A lucky misfortune, since the existence of what is known as “the false Quixote” allows Cervantes to explore the relationship between fiction and reality in the authentic part two in a way that is positively mind-boggling.

I enjoyed the interview with my old friend, especially the chance to talk to him at length about literature in general and his writing in particular.

http://bombsite.com/issues/121/articles/6771

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BIOGRAPHY OF JAIME MANRIQUE

Jaime Manrique / A Writer

Jaime Manrique

A WRITER

by Jaime Manrique

BOMB 121/Fall 2012

Edith Grossman When did you decide that you were going to be a writer? Was this decision sparked by a book or series of books?

Jaime Manrique I came to writing through my love of books. I was asthmatic as a child. Colombian television was in its infancy then, and therefore primitive, so I read—voraciously—everything I could get my hands on. Everything except the textbooks for school, that is. By the time I was 14 years old, I had read the two volumes of Vanity Fair in a couple of days andWuthering Heights 18 times. I slept with a copy of Crime and Punishment under my pillow. Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Dickens were my favorites. I used to cross the streets of Barranquilla while reading; my mother’s alarmed friends would call to tell her I was going to end up being killed by a bus. The rest of the time I spent at the movies. As a child, and as an adolescent, I lived in a world of fantasy that, by comparison, made life very boring and the people I knew unexciting. Family members would say, “If you don’t stop reading all the time, you’re going to end up going mad like Don Quixote.” When we read excerpts from Don Quixote in the ninth grade, unlike everyone else in class (the teacher included), I thought Don Quixote was saner than anyone I knew. Besides, I could not understand what was so great about living in reality.

http://bombsite.com/issues/121/articles/6771

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BIOGRAPHY OF JAIME MANRIQUE