rarely taught inside or outside universities, his interpretations are rarely given credence in academia, and his thoughts and life story are not considered worthy of publication. He performs not with hopes of fame, fortune, or applause, but rather out of love, out of a sense of sharing what he loves and loving what he does.
We tend to think of the literary translator as someone who’s good with languages. Which is like saying a musician is someone who’s good with notes. Of course he is, but being good with notes won’t make you a good musician; it’s just one of the requirements. In fact, some of the great jazz musicians never learned to read music; and there are great translations by poets who didn’t know the original language. To play music, you have to be able to play an instrument, and you have to be sensitive to nuances and understand what combinations of notes mean and are. Similarly, a translator has to be able to read as well as a critic and write as well as a writer. John Dryden said it best back in the seventeenth century: “the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable [is that] there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning.”* Not much has changed.
Yet Pushkin called the translator a “courier of the human spirit,”* and Goethe called literary translation “one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world.”* Well, this isn’t really what they said, but this is how their words have been translated into English. On the other hand, translators have been called plagiarizers, looters of other cultures, collaborators to colonialism, traitors, betrayers. They betray their people, their language, the original work, themselves. And all for seven cents a word, if they’re lucky.
Whether dignified or traitorous, translators are at least considered modest, especially for artists. What could be more modest than submitting yourself to someone else’s vision, characters, style, imagery, even sense of humor? Translators bring something to art that in many other times and cultures has been its core, its central aspect: devotion, service. Yet what could be more boastful
than saying that you are capable of writing a work as great as what
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