04/08/2025
Enjoyed reading this article about Potentialities ... and how a text communicates.
“Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work,” Max Norman writes. “Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up.” In the United States, it’s estimated that about 3% of books published annually are translations. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere.
Damion Searls, who has translated the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation in his new essay, “The Philosophy of Translation.” More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then recreated for a new reader.
Reading, according to Searls, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world, Norman writes. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. Read about one translator’s philosophy of the craft, which centers on trust and freedom: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/sHdXdc
