Who published a highly acclaimed English translation of Don Quixote in 2003?

Edith Grossman published a highly acclaimed English translation of Don Quixote in 2003. Her version brought Cervantes’s novel to a new generation of English-language readers and became one of the best-known modern translations.

Grossman aimed to preserve the energy, humor, tonal shifts, and conversational movement of Cervantes’s Spanish rather than make the prose sound artificially archaic. Critics and writers including Carlos Fuentes and Harold Bloom praised the result; Bloom famously compared Grossman’s translation to Glenn Gould’s musical interpretation.

The acclaim does not mean the translation is beyond criticism. Some Cervantes scholars, including Tom Lathrop and Daniel Eisenberg, questioned her choice of Spanish source text and identified what they considered inaccuracies. Translation quality can therefore depend on whether a reader values fluency, literary voice, textual fidelity, or scholarly apparatus most highly.

The date is an important clue. Samuel Putnam’s major translation appeared in 1949, while Grossman’s 2003 edition belongs to the wave of modern translations that reintroduced Cervantes in contemporary English.