Dear Miranda,
Gracias for your recent note. It came, as you say, “out of the blue,” an expression that, in and of itself, defies translation. In my native Spanish, one would say “de la nada,” not out of nowhere, since that would be “de ningún lugar,” but out of nothingness. Nothingness is a word that frightens me. It is similar to nothing, but with an added philosophical twist. Whenever I stumble upon it, I think of Fernando Pessoa: “Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.” Rendered into a rough English from Portuguese: “I am nothing. I will never be anything. I couldn’t want to be nothing. Besides that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.” But maybe the first line should be amended to “I am nothingness,” since Pessoa is talking about the condition of unimportance.
But excuse the detour: your letter is anything but unimportant. Among many other things, you ask me about “impersonating” famous poets, referring to the poems I shared in class purportedly written by Akhmatova, Celan, Drummond de Andrade, and Hikmet. You say you’re still thinking of them, in spite of all the time that has gone by.
You ask why I compose poetry from someone else’s perspective. Is it not fraudulent? What if any of these “originals” is confused by readers with a true work by these authors? Are you “passing”?
My answer might not satisfy you. Or else, it might disgust you. Chanelling someone else’s voice is what translators do. Why not go a step further, expanding the oeuvre of established poets? In some cases (Petrarch, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cervantes, Shakespaere, Borges, Amichai), I have spent years studying their mannerisms. Maybe I’m a vampire, sucking blood to remain remain alive.
And do I know all the languages I write in? Not all. I take after writers who have engaged in a similar feat: Samuel Beckett translated Mexican poetry with astonishing success. He had learned Spanish and French as a student at Trinity College, Dublin. But while French was essential to him (En attendant Godot began in French and then was self-translated into English), for some reason he avoided Spanish in his life. Still, his renditions in An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, compiled by Octavio Paz, completed in 1950 but not published until 1958, are astonishing. The project, sponsored by UNESCO, was part of a larger international cultural effort, though it was a task that Beckett reportedly found challenging.
Likewise, Richard Wilbur, known for his renditions of Molière and Racine, also translated from Russian (Akmatova and Brodsky), Spanish (Borges, Guillén), Italian (Dante, Quasimodo), as well as Portuguese, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Latin. Ursula K. LeGuin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, done even though LeGuin didn’t know Chinese. And W. S. Merwin translated from Dahomey and Quechua. These are just a few examples.
Like myself, the translators depend on an “insider” or on another language to reach the original. But you’re right: I have gone further: before or after doing my translations, I have created new originals. I have done this with the help of friends, colleagues, and, in some heteronymous cases, through A.I.
Once I started writing, I realized I could be an impostor as well. There is no shame in literary impostorship, only freedom.
Am I masquerading? Am I a charlatan? Yes, you are right: my biggest influence—the father figure I emutale—is Cervantes.
The real questions behind this endeavor are relatively simple: Are these good poems? And do they offer a fresh lens through which to appreciate the original author?
You say you remember the poems I brought after Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Paul Valèry. That makes me happy. I like the the rhyming patterns of my Mallarmé and Valéry. (By the way, have you read Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin,” set in the cemetery at Sète (where Valéry himself is now buried)? That haunting last stanza is memorable:
Le vent se lève!…il faut tenter de vivre!
L’air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux réjouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
I’m not sure about the counting of the syllables for the classical alexandrine verse (12 “feet”) and “uneven” verse (vers impair, defined by Verlaine in “L’art poétique”). In my Mallarmé, some lines may be too short (11 feet) or too long (13 feet), because of the “e muet” rule in classical French verse.
Anyway, here is another “fake original.” If you didn’t keep a copy of my previous version, lemme know. I can send you a PDF:
“Sur la Tombe” de Stéphane Mallarmé
Sous ce marbre muet, où les songes sommeillent,
Le dernier souffle d’encre au soir s’émerveille.
Mille vers se tressant s’élancent, disparus,
Ne roulant plus leur or dans l’ombre des perdus.
Échos des mots—éclats de voix éteintes,
Labyrinthe du cœur, ses flammes étreintes.
Ici, dans la poussière, un reste se dépose,
Tandis que le Temps meurt, et lentement explose.
Sous cette pierre dort le songe tissé d’ombre,
Fin de la syllabe et de la pensée sombre.
Un frémissement plane au bord de son essor,
Un soupir s’éteint dans l’infini sans corps.
Quel monde reste-t-il quand tout se tait encore?
La plume est un océan où l’âme s’évapore.
Dans le vers vide on cherche un infini brisé,
Dernier souffle: cercueil, silence, vérité.
Ô lettres frémissantes en la main de la mort,
Vous partez—mais gardez le secret du sort.
La tombe est un miroir sans rumeur, sans mémoire,
Rendant l’écho muet du néant, du miroir.
Ainsi, dans la poussière, un feu pur se soulève,
Dans l’étreinte de mort, le dernier mot s’achève.
*
All to say that I remember you fondly from your student days. In the classroom, you were bright and inquisitive, always adding insightful comments to our collective discussion. And your passion for language was infectious. You frequently landed on words, using them not only to say what you wanted but as snippets of information onto themselves. I particularly recall a moment when, amidst a discussion on the difference between the house and home, you said the first was physical and the second imaginary. Imaginary—you made clear to the rest of us that home is an artifice, an illusion, “por arte de magia”—an act of magic.
You might be surprised the quote still echoes in my mind. I think about it often: home as an act of magic. You were right.
It has taken me longer than expected to respond to you because first, it goes without saying that your request—to explain why I became a translator in the first place, my misgivings along the way, and “to grant advice about how to translate in an age of perplexity” where “everything seems to come to us at frantic speed”—needs careful calibration. I have spent long hours thinking how to go about responding to the letter. Honestly, my first reaction was to ignore it: out of sight, out of mind. Why, in this most agitated sea of responsibilities, should one interrupt the flux of things, to explain how an inadvertent aspect in one’s upbringing, in time but without clear explanation, became a central life theme?
Yet if we don’t do that—stop the world in order to reflect on what matters—death will visit us, unannounced, as it is wont to do, and then, kaboom, as we look into infinity, we will realize we gave up the opportunity of streamlining one’s thoughts, of making a coherent narrative of ourselves following a particular thread, of explaining why we are who we are.
*
You ask if translation is a worthy life pursuit, since your love for it is immense but “remuneration is meager.” I’m not sure that continues to be the case. Yes, although translators still aren’t fully recognized as embarking on “intellectual work” (as you know, it remains unacknowledged in tenure case), the landscape is changing rapidly. More and more schools have opened translation programs. In labor disputes, there are associations that defend the rights of translators. There are prizes specifically for translators, such as the National Book Award, ALTA, and others, and the Booker Prize for International Fiction now gives an award to the best novel in translation that is divided equally between author and translator. Along the way, the media pays more attention to translation issues.
At Restless Books, which as you know is devoted to contemporary world literature in translation, the translator’s name always appears—prominently—on the cover. After acquiring a book, matching the sensibility of the author with that of the translator is, in my view, the most important decision an editor makes. We are in no way outliers, although, it is true, corporate publishers still lag behind, considering the translator’s job as second or third tier.
The other way, I was rereading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. I had been translating into English Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s powerful self-defense Response to Sor Filotea, written at the request of her confessor. In it, she talks about the Greek mythical figure of Phaethon, the son of Helius, who asks his father to allow him to drive a chariot to the sun. Ovid narrates Phaethon’s ordeal in the last section of Book One and the first of Book Two. In her daring to challenge the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church in colonial Mexico, Sor Juana identified with Phaethon’s daring, know that she herself might likely die in her journey to intellectual enlightenment.
Then, by happenstance, I also opened a volume of Shakespeare’s poems and delved into Venus and Adonis, which he published in 1593, before he produced any of his masterpieces. The volume is also based on a section of Metamorphosis, where the unifying theme is change: constant, endless, unexpected change.
Sor Juana read Ovid in Latin, whereas Shakespeare knew, read, and borrowed from Arthur Golding’s translation of 1567, just as he borrowed from John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne’s essays, from which he also lifted a few passages, including parts of “Of the Cannibals,” in his play The Tempest.
Translators aren’t parrots, repeating a line in a new tongue. They are archeologists of our verbal reservoir, recognizing what words belong to which epoch.
Translation is a pivot for writers from around the world to find each other. Shakespeare’s education remains a mystery. How could a young man from Stratford-upon-Avon, who didn’t finish his schooling, have such learning on the classics, geography, philology, politics, and the human heart? The answer—not often said aloud these days of pluralistic fervor—is that school isn’t for everyone. Some are “autodidactas”—Spanish for self-taught. The best school isn’t necessarily the classroom. But whatever space it might take place in, it always, without except, requires the discovery, even in our age of computers, iPhones, tablets, and other technological devices, of the written page.
And that written page is often about foreignness—e.g., translation. In her private apartment in the convent of San Jerónimo, Sor Juana too had a personal library of about 4,000 volumes. They were in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps Hebrew. As she describes in Response to Sor Filotea, her learning was done solo, seldom with the help of a teacher but on her own.
I’m fond of Sor Juana’s interest in a type of Nahuatl poetry known as tocotines. Nahuatl was the language of the Aztec empire when the Spanish conquistadors arrived to what is Mexico today in the 16th century. Nahuatl quickly became a repressed—forbidden—language. Sor Juana owned a slave girl and had an indigenous young woman as a helper in her apartment. That maid likely spoke Nahuatl.
It has been said that the Nahuatl of Sor Juana’s tocotines is syntactically wrong. To me it doesn’t matter; it still showcases her desire to learn a tongue that at the time, and even today, wasn’t seen as sophisticated. Her theological dispute with Father Antonio Vieira on the sutiliezas of Jesus Christ, the capacity by the divine figure to engage in acts of kindness, took place in bilingual fashion, as Father Vieira was a Portuguese native and Sor Juana grew up in Spanish.
Nowadays in the United States, learning a second language is only the privilege of elite students. In a nation of immigrants, the irony is unavoidable, since immigrants are asked to give up their native tongue in favor of English. But even immigrants today realize that giving up their original tongue is unnecessary, as long as they learn English on the way of assimilation.
To return to your comment of the meager remuneration of translators. My impression is that it is unquestionably an investment to learn a second, third, and forth languages, and that devoting oneself to translator as a life-long endeavor is a savvy move. You just have to be creative, seeing translation from multiple perspectives, which in turn opens up countless opportunities.
*
You ask about what prompted me to create heteronyms. The answer is simple: I have always felt trapped in myself. Do we really have to live only one life? Since I was little, I have longed to be outside me, to see the world with more than one perspective. This might come from my father, who was an actor by trade. I was fascinated by his capacity to become other people. It wasn’t only fascination but envy: he had something I truly wished for myself. I thought this was a gift exclusive to actors. But once I started writing, I realized I could be an impostor as well. There is no shame in literary impostorship, only freedom.
The impact of my father’s acting goes farther. You wonder in your letter if a pseudonym is different from a heteronym. Yes, there are different: when I write under a pseudonymous name, it is still me hiding behind someone else’s name. The heteronyms are more complex: to write through them, you have to be an actor: to exist vicariously in another person. My heteronyms are very different from myself. They speak languages I do not; they hold political views that diverge from mine; they might even dislike me as a person. I don’t feel hurt. Why should I? They are independent from me, autonomous and self-sufficient.
The heteronyms didn’t all come at once. I have known a few for years, while others are recent acquaintances. At times, I discover a new one through a suggestion by one of the heteronyms I have been in dialogue with for a long time. In regard to them, you ask if I see myself as an orchestra conductor. Not in the least. Each has their own sound, but I don’t coordinate the sounds, attempting to fit them into a dialogue. In fact, in terms of personality a few of them are more controlling than me.
They are, indeed, a rowdy bunch: opinionated, rambunctious, and unpredictable. Do I like some more than others? I really have no favorites. Maybe when you become a parent, you’ll understand this approach. I’m far more interested in the fact that they exist, how they became the way they did, and how their translations have changed over their careers. I always learn a new perspective in the theory of translation from them.
Do they know each other? Yes, some do. Two of them are married. Others have met at conferences or during the launch of an author’s book. I know of at least two a couple of have engaged in a sustained e-correspondence.
*
I was born in Mexico City into an immigrant enclave. I’m the offspring of Ashkenazi Jews. My grandparents, all four of them, came from various parts of the so-called “Pale of Settlement,” the region in Eastern Europe and Western Russia where the Russian Czar had allowed them to live, in restricted rural areas. At the beginning of the 20th century, they immigrated across the Atlantic, each of the grandparents on their own, as a result of the dire economic conditions in which they lived and, mostly, because of anti-Semitism. Their common language was Yiddish. Collectively, they also spoke Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German.
To the best of my knowledge, Mexico was the final destination of two of them, maybe three. But even those three really wanted to travel to America, where family members had already gained entry. Quotas made it impossible. Mexico, therefore, was their second choice. Still, within just a few years they realized this was also a land of plenty. Within a decade or so from arrival, they officially became Mexicans.
I tell you this because although I grew up in a multilingual environment, I don’t recall ever noticing it. As a child, I would alternate languages effortlessly, depending on who I was with or what the topic at hand was. This mode of communication is now called code-switching. In my mind, it was the lay of the world; that is, I was sure everyone in the world did it. That, of course, is the view we all have before we realize that things are more complicated. Actually, as a sign of my encounter with reality, I remember interacting in the neighborhood with non-Jewish kids. They only spoke Spanish, which seemed not only easier but efficient. Why did I and my friends have to code-switch in order? It was cumbersome.
My love for translation emerges from that Babel-like emotions of my childhood. To translate is to communicate in ways that fit the needs of the environment. I have always seen translation as intricately connected with immigration. The Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Mexico were learning Spanish, but in Yiddish they could say things in a purer, untwisted fashion. Depending on the language they used, I would immediately be able to recognize, the moment I heard them speak, how authentic their messages were, how unobstructed by the rigidity, the tightness, the discomfort of a recently-acquired syntax.
It wasn’t until I became an immigrant myself, in the mid-1980s, from Mexico City to Manhattan, that I learned to appreciate in full the verbal gift my ancestors had granted me. I moved to New York with the dream of becoming a writer because I felt that I wouldn’t be able to explore it in full at home. As I look back at the Ilan Stavans that packed up his suitcases, I’m overcome by affection. He was naïve as well as Quixotic. At the time, New York was not only the capital of the literary world but an undisputed magnet for Latin American intellectuals, just as Paris had been for the “Boom” Generation I thoroughly admired, made of Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and others. I could work as a journalist, as a teacher, I could even enroll in a graduate program, as long as I allowed myself the chance to test my literary ambitions.
What that earlier incarnation of me didn’t fully see was that my immigration required learning yet another language: English. When I arrived, I could complete a sentence with enormous difficulty. My vocabulary was rudimentary. Worse, my pronunciation was erratic. There were a number of sounds I just couldn’t muster: “aw” and “ao,” as in caws and chaos; “th” as in thrifty, and “ph” as in ephemeral. Those early New York days were marked by embarrassment. I would be tentative about what I said, afraid to catch myself in descriptions for which I had a limited lexicon, and scared people would find me inept, not to say inflexible.
Mostly, it was a period in which I was impatient with myself. My objective was to be a writer—an English-language writer. Yet I didn’t have the skills to even build a compelling paragraph. How long would it take to be comfortable in the English language? Would the day come when people wouldn’t fixate on what I couldn’t say but, on the opposite, what I had managed, against all odds, to pronounce?
Immigrants figure out how to adapt. It’s a give and take that consumes every aspect of your being, but in the end, you succeed. You do without noticing it: one day you fumble a sentence and the next you’re a chronicle of a new way of seeing life.
As you see, I have endless admiration for immigrants, not only because I was once one of them. What attracts me the most is their creativity. They defy adversity by coming up with ingenuous solutions. This is seen all around: making ends meet at home, embarking on business deals, and imagining themselves with a fresh identity. They work two, three, four jobs in order to pay for tuition. They borrow in order to open a restaurant or a new store, in large part because they have nothing to lose. Yes, immigrants, before arriving, have already lost a lot. From now onward, everything is a plus.
I’m in awe by the immigrant’s talent to acquire a new language. I did it myself. Today I’m part of the English-language habitat. I translate from it and into it. I’m able to recognize how the English language has changed, translating, if I wish to, not to the contemporary English used in Manhattan nowadays but to Emily Dickinson’s New England English of the second half of the 19th century, or to Shakespeare’s variety, which to me, for all kinds of reasons, remains the most beautiful. I can also translate into García Márquez’s Colombian Spanish of the 1950s, to the Spanish of José Martí during the Spanish-American War of 1898, or to the Spanish of the colonial period used by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico circa 1690.
Translators aren’t parrots, repeating a line in a new tongue. They are archeologists of our verbal reservoir, recognizing what words belong to which epoch. Their task is to make those words come alive in a fluid, seamless way. But translators, like immigrants, are also inventors of neologisms. Shakespeare came up without about 1,700 new English words, from apostrophe to assassination, invulnerable, lapse, majestic, radiance and suspicion.
It is translators who give us the opportunity to coexist with other cultures. But it doesn’t come without difficulty.
Immigrants have replenished the English language in countless ways: Italians gave us fiasco, mafia, pizza, opera, and volcano. Yiddish donated bagel, goy, chutzpah, and schlep. The same goes for Irish, Chinese, German, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, and so on. Translators, likewise, are world builders. To go no farther, we credit the King James Version of the Bible, Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and other sacred sources, for female, childbearing, affliction, graven image, Shibboleth, Sodom and Gomorra, and, many more, including, most importantly, conscience, which comes from I Corinthians 8:7 and II Corinthians 5:11.
Without translators, the English language today would be a sheer skeleton, an empty vessel, deprived of its present glory. We owe it to them for having enhanced it with sublime terms that today are essential to our understanding of the world.
*
It was when meeting A., in New York City in the mid-1980s, that I realized my path was meant to be in English. I’m thinking of a line by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize winner, who I have translated both into Spanish and into English: “We have to believe in free will. We have no other choice.” As I look back at my twenties, I realize I chose English as my life-long, but that I had no choice. This isn’t fully true, as I’ve been telling you: I had Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and I had been studying French and Ladino, the latter the language of Sephardic Jews after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. Yet it does feel as if I had to choose English, that it was English where my freedom led me to.
I have written in my memoir On Borrowed Words about my obsessive, desperate need to become fluent in English. To me it was the only way I could see a future for myself. Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages felt peripheral, whereas English was the world’s epicenter, the stage where the actual play we called “the present” was being performed. I wanted to be part of that play. Being born in Mexico had given me countless tools to decipher the world, but I knew things were really happening elsewhere, up north. In Spanish, we lived in translation, whereas, in my naïve view, people in English created the originals. Decades later, as I look back at that version of myself, I cannot but feel nostalgia. Mexico today retains a sense of authenticity that America strives for but has inevitably lost. It grants itself the luxury of time to appreciate history with genuine curiosity. Here the past is a concoction. It has little value and is constantly being reinvented.
One of the myriad aspects of love I discovered with A. was about naming. The way she pronounced the English language, with astonishing care, as if every word matter, was flabbergasting. I frequently asked her to repeat a word, to syllabize it, to make a list of synonyms and antonyms. That is how, I believe, I fell in love with dictionaries. A. was an inexhaustible source of meanings and sounds, a living lexicon. She enjoyed delving into etymologies, making sound connections, allowing words to pair themselves in jazzy ways.
With the little money I had, I bought myself a copy of Melville’s Moby Dick. I had read it in Spanish before departing Mexico. Although the language was too difficult for me to comprehend in English, I read a paragraph a time with the help of an English/Spanish Spanish/English dictionary my father gave me as a present when he dropped me in the rented apartment, on Broadway and 121st Street, I would rent along with three roommates. The words I didn’t know—there were many!—I would write them down in a notebook. By the end of the session, which occurred late at night, I would have a list of fifty or more. I would then look up every word, attempting to memorize the meaning. I would proceed to close my eyes and repeat each word, followed by its dictionary meaning.
What I was doing, of course, wasn’t reading but creating a new self. The fact that I had chosen a 19th-century novel and not one published a year or two ago added to my sense of disjointedness: by day, I lived in New York, with its Babel-language tongues, uttered with gusto by immigrants and tourists from around the globe; but by night, I was in Nantucket, embarking on a southbound boat expedition across the Pacific in search of the great white whale. Once every two weeks, I would telephone my family in Mexico to describe my ordeal. They thought I was crazy. Why leave the comfort of a middle-class life in Mexico City and submerged myself, not only in the jungle of Manhattan but it the thickets of English grammar?
A. was my Virgil. Since we were in love, everything she taught me didn’t feel like a lesson but as an invitation for renewal.
*
Still, I never intended to become a translator. It is one thing to embark on an immigrant journey and another to become a professional translator. I don’t like the world professional; it denotes a mercenary approach to the discipline. Yet I recognize—it would be foolish not to—that my work as a translator is part of a transactional agreement. I pitch a translator to an editor or publisher, who either likes it or not. If they do, I make a contract with them that involves payment, a due date, and parameters such as length, type of readership, etc.
My love is for translation of poetry, fiction, essays, meaning an audience that is already elitist, made of aficionados. The number of people who read these kinds of literary artifacts, frankly, is small. In spite of the democratic, pluralistic dream we nurture of readers from all backgrounds delving into the Divine Comedy or savoring a poem by Anna Akhmatova or Paul Celan, the number is, statistically, insignificant.
But that is the wrong approach. In literature and the arts, what matters isn’t how many followers you have. It is their quality—their heft and complexity. I agree with the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin 37a:13 that anyone who sustains one soul, it is as if he sustained an entire world. Similarly, we shouldn’t care if a book has thirteen readers or thirteen million, as along as each and every one of those readers is rewarded by the reading.
I’m not disdaining literary success. Frankly, in translation that success is elusive even among bestselling books. If you’re lucky, you might hit the jackpot with a runaway hit. Yet even then, because of unfair practices of the book-publishing business, translators seldom get the reward they deserve, let alone the credit.
It is true that as of late things have been changing. Decades ago, the translator’s name might not even have been included, in small font, in the copyrights page. Today it shows up in the title page and, increasingly, in the cover as well. Still, translators are seen by publishers as mere contents providers. Their sensibility, their choices, their endurance is ignored. You have no doubt heard this complaint before. You should hear it many times again. Translator’s rights are human rights.
Each modern language has been built on the back of a long list of talented translators. Where would English-language readers be without the likes of John Florio, Constance Gardner, and Robert Alter? Countless poets have themselves been translators: Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Pablo Neruda, Emma Lazarus, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Joseph Brodsky, Octavio Paz, Marilyn Hacker, Seamus Heaney…
My belief is that we live in a golden age of translation, one similar to what took place in the Middle Ages in cities like Toledo and Constantinople. The amount of new translations being done today is astonishing. This means there is an insatiable hunger for books in other languages, in spite of the monolingual tendencies a few powerful nations continue to project. New novels, memoirs, histories, and other genres are translated at speedy rates. Globalism makes readers all over the globe want to read the same title with everyone else. It is called synchronicity.
However, that synchronic moment—the happenstance that thanks to translators, right now I hold in my hands the exact same volume that a Ghanaian, Japanese, and Urdu reader have is reason to rejoice. We can all be contemporaries of one another, rather than living, as was done in the past, in parallel, unencumbered dimensions. That is what colonialism was about: a hierarchical organization in First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds, each with their individual, exclusive needs.
It is translators who give us the opportunity to coexist with other cultures. But it doesn’t come without difficulty. The choice of content that is translated, and the distribution of books, are still an impediment for that simultaneity.
*
I have gone on for too long. It wasn’t my intention to steal time away from you. I hope these thoughts are of help to you. I’m not sure I answered your questions as fully and comprehensively as I wished. Everything we do is framed by the circumstances surrounding us. My succinct answer to your question: it is through translation, its labyrinthine paths, that we recognize our true worth. Calibrate your options to make peace with yourself. But without a doubt embark on translation as a lifelong quest. You will be all the better for it.
I look forward to more dialogue between us.
With affection, I
—Translation as Home: A Multilingual Life, by Ilan Stavans, edited by Regina Galasso (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
_______________________________
From Fictional Translations by Ilan Stavans. Copyright © 2026. Available from LSU Press.
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