Celebrated translator Edith Grossman dies in NYC at 87

Sept. 7 (UPI) -- Edith Grossman, who has been celebrated for elevating the role of the literary translator, died at her home in New York City on Monday. She was 87.

Her death was announced by her stepson Kory Grossman in a post on social media.

"My remarkable stepmother Edith Grossman passed away early this morning," Kory Grossman said in the post, adding: "Edie, we love you so much."

Kory Grossman told The New York Times she died of pancreatic cancer.

Grossman spent her career translating the works of authors including Nobel laureates Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa but busted into the spotlight with her translation of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, published in 2003.

Her translation has been considered one of the greatest translations of a novel from Spanish to English but was criticized by some as scholars as being inaccurate, and even "textually ignorant."

Still, Grossman made waves when her name appeared on the cover with Cervantes' -- helping elevate the role of the translator in modern culture -- and she advocated for better pay for translators.

"I think of the author's voice and the sound of the text, then of my obligation to hear both as clearly and profoundly as possible, and finally of my equally pressing need to speak the voice in a second language," she wrote in her 2010 book Why Translation Matters of her process.

Grossman's beloved prose made her a lifelong collaborator with García Márquez, the Colombian author of novels including One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love In The Time of Cholera.

"He would say nice things like 'you're my voice in English' and I just melted," Grossman said in the obituary she wrote for him upon his 2014 death. "I was really grief-stricken when he died. I felt as if the world were a smaller, darker place without him."