Introduction
Literary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing literature that is not his, that has someone else’s name on it, that has already been written. The translator’s work appears to define derivativeness. Would anyone write a book about people who sit in a museum copying paintings? Copiers aren’t artists, they’re students or forgers, wannabes or crooks.
Yet literary translation is an art. What makes it so odd an art is that physically a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer. If an actor did the same thing as a playwright, a dancer did the same thing as a composer, or a singer did the same thing as a songwriter, no one would think much of what they do either. The translator’s problem is that he is a performer without a stage, a performer who, when all his work is done, has something that looks just like the original, just like a play or a song or a composition, nothing but ink on a page.
Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone else’s composition and performs it in his own special way. Just as a musician embodies someone else’s notes by moving his body or throat, a translator embodies someone else’s thoughts and images by writing in another language. The biggest difference isn’t really that the musician produces air movements while the translator produces yet more words; it is that a musical composition is intended to be translated into body and throat movements, while a work of literature is not intended to be translated into another language. Thus, although it is practically invisible, the translator’s art is the more problematic one. And it is also the more responsible one, because while every musician knows that his performance is simply one of many, often one of thousands, by that musician and by others, the translator knows that his performance may be the only
one, at least the only one of his generation, and that he will not
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