Quote:
Why does someone translate? What possesses them? I can't speak for anyone else, but in my case it's firstly to scrape together a living in letters, and secondly a duty to the literature and the language (German). Once there, I also found I wanted to make a difference. I want it to matter that a book has had my time and my English expended on it, and not someone else's. I want both the choice of book, and the manner of the translation, to be expressive of me. Perhaps this is already illegitimate, I quite see that. Perhaps this is some of the executive vanity of authorship meddling with and muddying the dull pitch of the translator. But I'm not deluded. I may set down every word of my Koeppens and Roths (proper names excepted), but I don't think I'm them.
The trouble, it seems to me, is that translation is perceived as a function, not an agency. It's not fully personalised and accredited work. No one sees it. You're an ambulance driver, not a surgeon. If not me, then someone else. If not someone else, then me. When people buy a book, they want to read the author, not a centaur or a Zygos brothers figure - the work, and not the product of something I once described as "the strange bi-authorship of translation". If the book was written in a different language, then there will, perforce, have to have been a translator involved in it, but the reader prefers to remain unaware of that. It may even be disagreeable to be informed or reminded of the fact. Even otherwise bookish people seem never to know who translated the book they are reading. Efforts by publishers to promote something as a "new translation", I am convinced, do as much harm as good. There's something as unnatural and infrequent about those as there is about a comet; people quite naturally take fright.
In the English-speaking world (ha!), there is very little empathy with translators. Most readers don't have any experience of translating, or indeed of another language at a serious level. Most authors and reviewers don't either. Among poets, off the top of my head I can only think of a handful who translate: Muldoon, Heaney, George Szirtes, and Don Paterson, with his Machado, and a Rilke forthcoming. Among novelists only Tim Parks (recently retired from the fray), and Julian Barnes with his Daudet. There are one or two more in the US. (You do get them in the theatre, though, where it sometimes seems that every English and Irish playwright has had a go at Chekhov, but the ground rules there are different; they work from literal versions, and it's their dramaturgical expertise and ear for speech that are brought to bear.) Any European country, I think, would have dozens of equivalent figures who had offered translations. Pavese translated; Proust translated; Bruno Schulz translated. It's an ordinary aspect of literary work. Eco refers to an Einaudi series of books translated by Italian authors. Primo Levi translated The Trial; Eco himself did De Nerval's Sylvie. A series like that would barely get off the ground in the UK.
The background of such ignorance and lack of experience has left an odd nimbus or whiff around translation. People don't know how to talk about it, and so they don't like to talk about it. Translation is perceived either in terms of clarity and faithfulness (Eco does it too), or in terms of mistakes, which is banal, because everyone makes mistakes. Again, a function, rather than an agency. Everything beyond that is shrouded in an unfortunate mystique. But really, there is no mystery. If you have a good time with a book, praise the author; if you have a good time with a paragraph, praise the translator (as well). That would be my rule of thumb.
(An excerpt from 
