What is exciting about translation, then, is not the notion that it has delivered a hundred percent—something Schleiermacher would never have signed up to—or that the entire world of human feeling can be made available to us in our own idiom—a fantasy that will only induce complacency—but its encouragement to move toward, or at least become aware of, what we do not know; translation as a wake-up call, and an instrument to spur us to more effort, not to have us sit back and applaud another successful worldwide publishing phenomenon.
To close on a provocation, it’s perhaps worth observing that current enthusiasm for literary translation in the Anglo-Saxon world has come at the same time as a steep decline in language learning.
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Scott BeauchampWriter - Critic - Poet - Editor Archives
December 2020
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