never put on himself and would not ask of a translator were he still alive.
Devotion can also lead to feelings of trepidation, worries of letting a writer down. But part of that devotion, and often a more important part, is the sort of love that makes you want to share the author with those who otherwise would never know him. Translators aren’t the sort of selfish lover who wants to keep his loved one all to himself. They give others access to the loved one. Rika Lesser wrote in the introduction to her book of translations from the Swedish, A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems by GöranSonnevi, “These are poems I fell in love with. These are poems that have helped me live, as a human being, in and outside of language. Of course it is my hope they will do the same for you.”*
Devoted translators risk losing their own identity to the stronger identities of the writers they translate. Devotion can also lead to closeness bordering on, or across the border into, obsession. As Christopher Middleton once said, “I don’t like to [translate] too much because when I’m translating a poem—or any text actually—I pursue this ‘other’ obsessively and compulsively, and I can’t think or do anything else. That’s why, when I’ve been asked to do a longer prose work, I’ve been very reluctant to undertake the job. . . . it is an incubus.”*
For some translators, especially those who specialize in a small number of authors, “affinity” and “devotion” go hand in hand. Eliot Weinberger has principally translated the poetry of Octavio Paz. He told me, “You can really only translate a few people. What I mean is that you have to have a total immersion in the work, you have to know everything about the work, and you have to have some kind of affinity, and I think that’s only possible with a few people. I’ve done things for an anthology, where I’ll translate one or two poems by a poet I sort of know, but not particularly well, and the translation is fine, but I feel it lacks a certain kind of vitality. A lot of people disagree with me on this point. They think they can translate anything. Usually when you have an anthology translated by one person, it’s a disaster. A few of the poems are good; the rest aren’t.”
For Weinberger, love is not enough: “There are writers whom
one loves for all different reasons. Like people, or anything else.
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