Columbia University hosted “Retranslating Literary Classics: A Panel on Cervantes, Montaigne, and Dostoevsky” featuring Edith Grossman, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, and Wyatt Mason, moderated by Susan Bernofsky. The blog “Bwog” recounts the event.

“You may recognize some of these names: Edith Grossman translated the edition of Don Quixote we read in Lit Hum, and Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated Crime and Punishment. Which means, they were the names you saw when you looked up at your shelf and thought about how you really should be doing that reading,” says the blog entry. “Edith Grossman, who specializes in translating modern Latin American literature as well as more classic Spanish texts, spent much of her speech expounding on the importance of Don Quixote. Describing it as the greatest novel ever written, the first of its kind, Grossman stated that no English writer has had an influence close to that which Cervantes has had on Spanish, dismissing Shakespeare and the King James Bible as too poetic and esoteric.”

Read the complete story here.