covering 3,000 sheets of toilet paper before finally being given real paper on which to finish his job.
There are all sorts of other reasons a translator starts translating: because he can't find enough translators to do work for his literary magazine, for mental exercise, for the money, because she had a translator for a mentor, because he thinks he can do better than what’s out there, for her dissertation, for an apprenticeship, for himself. Even love can turn people into translators; in fact, being blind, in this sense, helps.
Probably the most romantic translation story I've come across is that of Barbara and Benjamin Harshav. Benjamin was born in Vilna, which was then part of Poland but is now part of Lithuania. His first language was Yiddish. After the war he went to Germany, where he edited a Hebrew-language literary journal and did translation for it into and out of several languages, but particularly into Hebrew. Then he moved to Palestine, fought in the War of Independence, and founded a literary journal with the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and others. He continued to translate poetry into Hebrew, with the express purpose of bringing individualist poetry into a language whose poetry was primarily group-oriented: religious, socialist, about the Jewish people.
On a visit to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he met Barbara and together they began translating into English the work of American Yiddish poets. His English was already pretty good, because he had gone to graduate school at Yale (where he currently teaches); but her English was much better. Her weakness was that she did not know Yiddish.
They spent their first two married years in Germany, where she learned both German and Yiddish. She, too, had already done a great deal of translation, although not for publication: in order to keep up the French she had learned in school, she had spent an hour-and-a-half every morning translating French fiction into English—all of Balzac and then all of Zola. In Germany she did the same thing with German writers. Just for herself. Translation can be that enjoyable, that useful, and that addictive.
Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet, also got into translation via love. He said: "I learned English mainly to read poetry. Then, reading English and French poems, I felt that they
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