Gazette:News:In other words

English's Primacy




Un appel aux lecteurs
du Courrier des Balkans




By Estelle Gilson

A practitioner describes the love, loss, and limits involved in the fine art of translation.

The greatest theatrical, literary, and musical works are magnetic - they continually attract reinterpretation and modernization. Mozart's 220-year-old "Don Giovanni" has been updated with bra-and-panty-clad choristers, Shakespeare's 400-year-old "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with rock 'n' roll. Aristophanes's plays have been slangified to hell and back, and Dante's "Commedia" has turned up in every literary style from terza rima to no rima at all.

Which brings me to literary translators and that easy Italian pun, "traduttore/traditore," by which the world knows us. Toss the term into Google and it turns up a website that declares: "Translator, you're a traitor!"


True, no translation can reproduce the full vitality, power, subtlety, and excitement of an original work. And true, too, there are bad translations. But faulty as translations can be, imagine, if you can, a world in which the Bible had remained Hebrew and the New Testament Greek.

The Boston Globe



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