Is it possible to appreciate the pleasures of foreign books, without going to the trouble of learning another language? Step forward the mighty translators, the often unsung heroes of world literature. As Penguin celebrates its 80th year with the Little Black Classics series – including 48 translations of non-English texts, award-winning translator ANTHEA BELL writes for BBC Arts about the value of translation.

Edith Grossman’s short book Why Translation Matters tells readers why. Most translators love it, and her title was not framed as a question, but I have heard similar wording that asks: does translation matter? I’ve also heard that answered in the negative.

A couple of decades ago, at a PEN International Day on translation in London, I was on a panel that also included the late Michael Henry Heim. Just before our event, a famous pundit who shall be nameless swept in, and announced from the stage that all translation was by definition useless, pointless and downright bad.

She then read aloud a good deal of poetry in Spanish with no concessions to anyone in the audience who didn’t know the language, and swept out again without giving any time for questions. It was left to our panel to pick up the pieces.

Some years later I met Michael Heim again in Chicago, where W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz had just won the Wolff Prize for translation from German; Michael himself won it three years later with his new version of Mann’s Death in Venice. He thought that Chicago was our first meeting, but when I reminded him of the earlier occasion he did recollect it. It had been such a grim moment, he said, that he must have unconsciously deleted the memory from his mind.

We did our best on that panel to retrieve the reputation of translation and translators – if translators were an evil, surely they were a necessary evil. Luckily everyone present had only to recollect the opening event of the day, a talk by Michael Ignatieff on literary translation, to see our point. More.

See: BBC

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