primarily as part of an enterprise, a cataloging or theorizing or building of traditions, or lives, or connections. It isn’t their feelings they’re looking to satisfy as much as it is their minds. And they’re usually more interested in aspects of content than of form.
This sort of reader is more likely to translate than any other, but primarily as part of the same enterprise. If you want to use a work as an example, and it happens to have been written in a foreign language and not yet translated into English, there is nothing to do but translate it. If you want to convince people of your political or theoretical or personal values, you will want to share some of what you see as the most important examples supporting them. You translate the work often because you love it, but also because it’s important to whatever cause you happen to be fighting for. Thus, a great percentage of literary translation going on in the United States today is done by professors, especially from Spanish, especially of Latin-American writing of a political nature. Or at least it is approached in a political way. The translated authors are less artists than victims or witnesses. Although on the whole very well intentioned, and often reasonably competent, these translators are considered something apart from the mainstream, not because they have different political views, but because they read and translate for different reasons. And this gulf is made worse because many of them do not seem to recognize this distinction — or they deny that it exists.
There are also those professor-translators who work with material from a place and time in which they specialize, from fourteenth-century Japanese drama to Egyptian hieroglyphs. These works might be of great value, even high quality, and today’s English-speaking world might be highly fortunate to have access to them. But they are often works that are very difficult to bring into contemporary English-language culture, and the professor-translator often does not have the ability to give them life in the here and now.
Now, please don’t get me wrong: not all professors are in the business of literary mummification. Many of our best translators are professors. But their approach to literature is different from the
professors I’ve been discussing. These other professors constitute a third type of reader: the reader who cares more about how it is
21
