It’s a crazy thing to want to be a writer; very few ever make it, and many thousands of would-be’s are frustrated all their lives. It’s even crazier to want to be a translator, because almost nobody makes it. The one saving grace is that there’s not the same sort of feeling of frustration when you don’t make it, because it’s only your skills, not your self, not your take on life, that are being rejected. Yes, it’s frustrating to know you probably won’t be able to find a publisher for what you want to translate, and that you’ll probably have to translate authors you’re not so attached to. But you can still enjoy the process, still translate excellent writing, and still share even unpublished results with your friends and students, not as the failed expression of your soul, but as the successful performance of a work you admire. You can, in short, do what you set out to do, what attracted you to translation in the first place. Most of all, people are attracted to translation to share what they love, and just for the sheer intellectual joy of doing it.
Because they naturally live at the intersection between language and literature, no one is more likely to be a translator than foreign language and literature professors. But professors who translate differ greatly from one another, just as readers read differently and for different reasons. Or so I am going to argue. Most people read literature primarily for pleasure. They are consumers, consuming the tension of suspense, the release of humor, the escape of adventure, the titillation of sex, the confirmation of beliefs, the tears of another’s loss, the joy of another’s victory. When a book does not have what they’re looking for, or when it asks too much of the reader in order to get at it—as bees keep most people away from honey—the literary consumer turns to something else. In fact, these days the literary consumer almost always turns away from poetry. And from fiction in translation. Needless to say, this sort of reader never becomes a translator. However, this sort of reader sometimes becomes a writer, though usually of genre fiction.
Other readers—usually academics or lifetime students— approach literature the way a doctor approaches a corpse. They see literature as something to dissect, something in which there are things to point out, something that confirms or overturns theories,
grist for this or that mill. They are users who see literature
20
