Despite my last post, the NY Times ain't all bad. I'm impressed that their Sunday Book Review this week is all about fiction in translation. There is great info gathered on translation, the perilously low numbers of books in translation in the US and other compelling data.
Also, Joel Agee writes this about translation:
I was a writer before I became a translator, and it was the writer in me who taught the translator the exacting discipline of fidelity to the original text,” Agee said by e-mail. “But the translator in turn taught the writer something he didn’t know yet: To write is to translate — not from another language, but from a formless, darkly stirring source where what needs to be said is felt to be potentially or even actually already present. That is how the impossible work begins. Gradually, and sometimes in bursts, the translation into language takes shape, and when it is done, it seems like a miracle.
