Preparing for the Best
You will note that I refer to translators as “them.” Let me begin by confessing that I am not a literary translator. Like a professor who writes about literature but has himself written only a few poems or stories, most of which remain in his desk drawer, I have done only a little translation, most of which is sitting where it belongs.
Although I do read three languages in three different language groups (French/Romance, Czech/Slavic, German/Germanic —in order of competence), I am not fluent in any of them and, therefore, translation is a long and difficult process for me. I have, however, edited numerous book-length translations, which, at least the careful way I do it, is painstaking enough.
Despite my linguistic limitations, translation is my true love. I can’t think of many better ways to spend an evening than to pull out a collection of French or Czech or German poetry, flip through the pages looking for the right author and the right poem for the occasion (usually a short one), and then set myself up at my desk with two or three dictionaries (foreign-English, foreign, English), a thesaurus, the poetry collection, and that greatest of all literary icons, the blank sheet of paper.
My experiences with translation have shown me clearly that it is not a matter of transcription, playing around with languages, or writing somebody else’s book. It is a very demanding intellectual and artistic process, and most highly literate people are incapable of doing it at a professional level.
Translation is a very active way of reading something closely, critiquing it, and writing it, all at the same time. This is the performance. A literary critic also reads closely, critiques, and writes, but his writing takes the form of statements. The translator has to put his pen where his mind is, not in the terms of a critical statement, but in the termlessness of a literary work.
