holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may
come by the water.
Translation gives us access to the literature of the world. It allows us to enter the minds of people from other times and places. It is a celebration of otherness, a truly multicultural event without all the balloons and noisemakers. And it enriches not only our personal knowledge and artistic sense, but also our culture’s literature, language, and thought. All it takes to bring a particular variety of Latin American music to North America is a group of Latin American musicians, or just an album. But to bring a particular Latin American author to America, to those who don’t read Spanish or Portuguese, it takes another artist, a translator. Without translations of the early novels of Gabriel García Márquez, contemporary American literature would be a very different thing.
Light, food, water, religion. These are what the King James translators said translation gives us access to: the necessities of life, at least for a puritanical people. Think where we would be if we were not only unable to read the Bible or the ancient classics or Cervantes, Voltaire, Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, and if the writers we could read had themselves read no more than a few of the great writers and thinkers of history and their time. We would be unenlightened, thirsty for knowledge, hungry for art.
My intention in this book is to give people access to the people who give us access, and to the art by which they provide such access. And to do it with humor and passion. I will talk about what someone has to have and be to make a good translator, about how translators relate to the literary works they translate, as well as to the authors and editors they work with and for. I will talk about what translators do, about the big and little decisions they have to make. I will talk about the translator’s public image and what can be done by translators, publishers, reviewers, professors, writers, and even readers to change it. In other words, I will try to shake up perceptions about translation and translators.
But my principal goal is to help readers understand what translation is all about, so that they can learn to appreciate this hidden art. This labor of love and of joy deserves to be loved and
