Edith Grossman and Natasha Wimmer are the ones to thank for translating titles from Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Roberto Bolaño, Mario Vargas Llosa... In this piece, they tell Newsweek how they started their careers and why they are two of a handful of people that can make a living doing literary translation in the U.S.

“When Edith Grossman was translating a novel by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, she was struggling with how to handle the ubiquitous slang. One day, at lunch with Fuentes, Grossman asked him how he had picked up such a vast repertoire of dirty, vulgar and unheard-of slang. 'He said, Well, number one, when I was a young man I was in bars a lot.… Secondly, I make it up, so you can invent it, too,’ Grossman recalls. 'I said, You made it up? No wonder I couldn’t figure out what these phrases meant.’ So I made it up too.' For inspiration, she would sit near adolescent boys in the subway and listen to them talk, she says.”

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