But here, I commit no such sin.Ĭhevalier who did a horrible job here, his only saving grace being that he was lucky.
And so now I repent and ask forgiveness for my many sins of ingratitude, those countless occasions where I toasted the writers and their works while ignoring, forgetting and treating as completely insignificant their translators without whom I would have not been able to read what they've written at all. I am sure I've read about several great writers, though at the moment I remember only Nabokov, who developed their literary muscles translating classics before they wrote their own. So in reading a work which is not in its original language it matters a lot which translation you read, and that you cannot really be sure, going gaga over a 'masterpiece' you've just stumbled upon, if the same was excellence conceived or excellence in translation. A bad translation can mangle a work beyond recognition a good translation-as GR's Cynthia Nine attests vis-a-vis Coelho's regurgitations-is capable of turning out something even better than the original, like a much improved version of a crude prototype the author originally wrote.
That the act of translating a literary work is not a neutral and mechanical act but a truly creative one.
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