September 30 is the feast day of Saint Jerome, the patron saint of translators. It is also international translation day. To mark this occasion, our Editorial Director, Sharmila Sen, devised a Proust questionnaire and shared it with translators around the world over the weekend. Our translator friends wrote back with alacrity, wit, and even a bit of wickedness. Though these men and women work in different parts of the world, on different languages, and have varied literary tastes, it soon became clear that they are united in their skepticism of fidelity being the hallmark of a good translation. We invite you to enjoy their responses.
Over the course of this week, we shall share some of these responses through social media. Please join the conversation and celebrate translations and translators everywhere.
Hamid Dabashi
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Suspiciously attractive. If it’s done well something is fishy. If not, why bother?
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
“Cultural understanding.” The best translations are monumental misunderstandings.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Ibn Muqaffa’ who translated a Pahlavi translation of the Sanskrit original of Panchatantra into Arabic.
What is your favorite work of translation?
That translation of Panchatantra by Ibn al-Muqaffa he called Kelileh and Dimnah.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Any translation of any Persian poetry into English, particularly Hafez.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Qalandar — means something between a wise saint and a rank charlatan.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
King James translators of the Bible with Hafez.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Cyropedia by Donald Trump.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
Trump’s tweets by Ibn Muqaffa’ — from Trump’s little English to Ibn Muqaffa’s sublime Arabic back to archaic Pahlavi and the wonder of Sanskrit.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Hamlet into Persian.
Which work would you never translate and why?
Hafez into English. Makes the sublime ridiculous.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
Mirza Habib Isfahani’s Persian translation of James Morier’s Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan. He turned a nasty colonial officer’s racist lampoon into the manifesto of a national revolution against colonialism and tyranny.
Hamid Dabashi is the author of many titles, including Persophilia: Persian Culture on the Global Scene, The World of Persian Literary Humanism, Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest, and most recently, The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature.
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Charles Hallisey
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Joyful and grateful. [Sharmila: I am reading a great translation of the Turkish writer Tanpinar because we are in Turkey, The Time Regulation Institute, by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe; I recommend it.]
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Fidelity
What is your favorite work of translation?
Kamo-no-Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World, translated by Yasuhiko Moriguchi and David Jenkins
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Anything by Google translate, although it has its own amusements.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
-vahansē, an honorific in Sinhala (but there are so many! How to choose?!)
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Celan with the Therigāthā.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Kampan's Ramayana by the late A.K. Ramanujan.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
The complete Pali version of the stories of the Buddha's previous lives, the Jātakas, into English
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
Celan's translations of some of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Charles Hallisey is the translator of the Pali classic Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women.
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Johanna Hanink
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Anticipatory
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Lately I’ve been hearing about translations being judged in part on the “cultural significance” of the source text’s author. I’d rather read a good translation of a great work by someone unsung than a bad one of a work by someone deemed “important.”
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
I don’t know if I’d call him underrated—more under-appreciated—but Cicero did a huge amount to bring Greek literature in translation to Roman audiences.
What is your favorite work of translation?
English as She Is Spoke, a 19th-century English phrasebook (with several dialogues) translated by Pedro Carolino. The thing is, Carolino didn’t actually know English, so he seems to have translated a Portuguese-French phrasebook using a French to English dictionary. Of the result Mark Twain wrote: “Its delicious unconscious ridiculousness, and its enchanting naivete, are as supreme and unapproachable, in their way, as are Shakespeare's sublimities.” Everyone should own a copy (mine is a now out-of-stock reprint by McSweeney’s).
What is your least favorite work of translation?
I am going to interpret “work of translation” here as “labor of translation,” so my answer is: all of the work tied to Classics PhD translation exams. I don’t think they’re a great measure of linguistic proficiency (and they’re very unpleasant to grade), but every North American Classics PhD program still relies on them as one of the last hurdles students have to clear before candidacy.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
The Ancient Greek words logos and ergon form a binary pair and often appear together; they have a huge range of meanings both separately and in tandem. Your basic definitions are “word’ and “deed,” but when I was working on Thucydides’ speeches I sometimes translated these words differently even within the same sentence. (I am hugely skeptical of translations that boast of always using the same target-language word for each occurrence of a certain source-language word: what’s the point of the translator, then?)
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
I’d love to see Catullus translated into (Modern) Greek by Sam Albatros, who has a site called Queer Poets in Greek. He uploads a new translation every week.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Something more than a century old counts as ancient these days, right? Assuming it does, I’m going to say a translation by Karen Emmerich of Alexandros Papadiamantis’ 1903 The Murderess. The Murderess is a chilling novella about an old woman on the island of Skiathos who embarks on a “mercy” killing-spree of baby girls: burdens to their families who have lives of nothing but hardship ahead of them. I’m curious about how Emmerich, one of the greatest contemporary translators of Modern Greek into English, would handle Papadiamantis’ diglossia (his mix of high and low registers), which is notoriously hard to translate. Emmerich herself is such a profoundly insightful and humane thinker and writer, so I’d also just love to see how she redraws Hadoula, the novella’s protagonist, in her own prose. I recently read The Murderess in Greek and often caught myself thinking: “I wonder how Emmerich would translate this!”
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which I’d want to see translated by “Homer.”
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Someday I’d like to translate the entirety of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War into English, because I want the opportunity simply to read it as closely and carefully as the work of translation requires.
Which work would you never translate and why?
The Odyssey, for obvious reasons! But I really I don’t think I could ever do an extended work of poetry (so no ancient Greek drama, either). I’m not a poet; I don’t’ have a poet’s eye or ear, and I’d be way too stressed about formal choices—like what to do with meter.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
I sometimes write for a Greek media outlet called ThePressProject, and when I do, I write in English and have my friend Konstantinos Poulis (who is an author and a great literary translator) translate them into Greek. I always think the pieces sound much better in Greek, which is thanks to Konstantinos: he is the author of some of my best writing.
Johanna Hanink is the author of The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity and the translator of Thucydides.
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Ranjit Hoskote
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
In three words: Upbeat, Fröhlich, maha-khush!
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Fidelity. I’m sick of people asking whether something is a ‘literal translation’. I’ve figured out an answer: Since there are no literal originals, there can be no literal translations. Tamam shud.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Kumarajiva. His work was so foundational that he vanished into it – rather like Ko-ai, the daughter of the ancient Chinese bell-maker, who leapt into her father’s tank of molten metal, vanishing into the bell whose perfection was made possible only by her blood.
What is your favorite work of translation?
The King James Version. I cherish it. And it is not hard for me, adapting very loosely from Acts 9:5, to kick against the pricks who renounce it in favor of current-usage translations.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
So many, I had not thought translation had undone so many. I think, here, of various well-meaning assaults, over the years, on the departed spirits of Rilke, Trakl, and Celan. But my least favorite among these would have to be the sainted J B Leishman’s assassination of Rilke. Perhaps Rilke was being prescient about this when he wrote: “Und ich in Lohe. Niemand der mich kennt.” (“And I, in flames. Not one who knows me.”)
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Three words, all from the Urdu: mahaul, junoon, zamana. Mahaul: ethos, climate, the mood of a time, society, group, or milieu; indwelling or external? Perhaps indwelling and external? Junoon: madness, frenzy; a sweeping mass mania, or a daemon taking possession of the everyday self, pushing it to extremes of feeling and action? Zamana: world, time, period, society; or shall we try chronotope? Ai Bakhtin, Moscow ko bhool, tu kyon na paida hua Lucknow main?
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
I’d nominate Gregory Rabassa to translate Xi You Ji (otherwise Journey to the West or Monkey, the Ming-era Chinese classic). Perhaps in another life, now.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
The Fragments of Heraclitus, to be translated into English by Ishion Hutchinson. What might a poet living at the edge of one ocean, wrestling with his plural inheritance, confronting one set of crises, sound like to another poet living at the edge of another ocean, wrestling with his quite distinct plural inheritance, confronting another set of crises – the two of them being 2500 years apart in time? How would Heraclitus resonate through Hutchinson’s ability to marry the spare and the gorgeous?
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
I would have liked to see Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy translated into Urdu by Altaf Hussain Hali. A translation like that would have brought us the delights of the kaleidoscope, patterns seen through counter-patterns, three linked novels from one part of the Islamic ecumene refracted through the optic of a poet from another – both writers coping with the momentous experience of aftermath, the passing of a regionally anchored empire and the rise of new challenges from beyond the horizon.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
I would love to translate a selection of Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry from the original Urdu into English. I am, as it happens, at work on this project – and have been immersed in his versatile, unpredictable, witty, plangent, always dazzling verse.
Which work would you never translate and why?
The Mahabharata. Because I’m possessive of so many of the twists and turns in that incredible labyrinth, imbued as they are with deep childhood memories of hearing them from my mother, with her comments and her way of conjuring up a world around the episodes. These are pleasures that – alas, against the spirit of the translatorial adventure – I can’t bring myself to share.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
I’d have to pass, here, from one medium of translation to another. I find myself absolutely compelled by the long-running ITV series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with David Suchet as the Belgian detective. I could drop everything and binge-watch these episodes. By contrast, I find Christie’s original Poirot series tedious, pedestrian, sketchy – and the eponymous character often plain silly. The ITV series generates subtle layers of historical context. And in Suchet’s magisterial interpretation, Poirot rises far above Christie: the shades of melancholia, nostalgia, injured dignity, audacity, wisdom and European urbanity that Suchet conveys are worlds away from – and far superior to – the Euro-buffoonish caricature that his original creator summoned up in her Poirot novels. Perhaps we could dwell usefully on this in the Year of Brexit.
Ranjit Hoskote is a poet and the author of Jonahwhale.
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Anthony Kaldellis
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Moratorium (when it comes to me doing more, that is).
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Winning awards for translation.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Virgil, for his translations of Homer known as the Aeneid.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Children’s books translated into high-style, literary prose (usually in order to win awards). You can’t read them to children!
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
filotimo — when used in a self-congratulatory way
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, translation into Greek by Aristophanes.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Niketas Choniates’ History, ideally by Thomas Hobbes.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
If I had Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy in a translation by Thucydides, I would not teach any other prose text again.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Ohio State University’s travel policy, into English.
Which work would you never translate and why?
Carl Schmitt’s Glossarium, because we don’t need another self-pitying defense of amoral racist tyranny.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
The ancient Greek version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Anthony Kaldellis is author of Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Romeand the translator of several Byzantine Greek works for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library series.
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Aviad Kleinberg
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Indifference.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Professional pride.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Alexander Lenard translator of Winnie the Pooh into Latin.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Book of Mormon.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Ezra Pound's translations of poetry.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Elohim. It does not mean "God".
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Dante and Ibn Gabirol.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
The City of God by Jonathan Franzen. It would keep him busy.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
Milosz by Conrad.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
The Itinerarium mentis in deum by Bonaventure into Hebrew.
Which work would you never translate and why?
The Book of Mormon, perfectly translated by Joseph Smith moments before the original disappeared.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
Lenard's Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh is much better than the original.
Aviad Kleinberg is the author of The Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List (translated by Susan Emanuel) and Flesh Made Word: Saints’ Stories and the Western Imagination (translated by Jane Marie Todd).
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Daisy Rockwell
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Baleful.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Fidelity.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Aren't all translators underrated?
What is your favorite work of translation?
K. Scott Moncrieff'sRemembrance of Things Past.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
All the translations I have seen by Jai Ratan, an early translator of modern works of Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi into English. I've been admonished for criticizing him because he was a pioneer in the field, and worked on literature no one cared to translate, but his choices are so fascinatingly off-kilter I just can't stop fixating on them.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Jaltarang--it's a kind of Indian music played by striking with sticks small ceramic cups filled with water--22 cups - was considered ideal in medieval texts. The cups are of varying sizes filled with varying amounts of water. The particular instance when I had to translate it, it was used as a metaphor for the sound of rain water hitting a metal roof covering a sort of metal mesh over an inner courtyard--a very romantic monsoon image, but both the primary image and the thing it was being compared to require large numbers of explanatory words that ruin the feeling of the original image.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
I would have Urdu and Persian translator/novelist Musharraf Ali Farooqi translate Dante's Inferno into Urdu.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
So many ancient Indian texts are getting terrific make-overs nowadays I don't know what stones are unturned, but it would be kind of cool to see Anne Carson try her hand at something like the Bhagavad Gita.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
I'd sort of like something like Midnight's Children to be translated into Purabi Hindi couplets by Kabir. It would be incomprehensible. But imagine the possibilities!
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
I can only translate into English in real life, but for some reason I wish I could translate Winnie the Pooh into Urdu.
Which work would you never translate and why?
Never say never. Sometimes you don't realize how impossible something is until you actually try to translate it. Something that seems really hard might turn out to be easier than it looked. The reverse is also true. The book I am currently translating is one that in retrospect I would have put in the 'never-translate' category for its wordplay and experimentation, but I'm on the second draft, and it's too late now!
Daisy Rockwell has published numerous translations from Hindi and Urdu, including Upendranath Ashk’s Falling Walls, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Khadija Mastur’s The Women’s Courtyard.
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Carlos Rojas
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
They persist!
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Fidelity
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Jane Goodall? Translating between human language communities is one thing, translating between different species is something different altogether.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Taiwanese author Hsia Yü's self-published 2007 poetry collection Pink Noise. For this text, she culled a set of English and French from the internet and then repeatedly fed them through an Apple translation and search software called Sherlock, yielding extremely idiosyncratic Chinese equivalents. The resulting trilingual text was then printed in pink and black text on a set of transparent polyurethane pages, producing a fascinating palimpsestic effect whereby the reader sees multiple layers of text overlaid onto one another.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Taiwanese author Hsia Yü's self-published 2007 poetry collection Pink Noise. Judged by conventional translation standards, the translations in Pink Noise are decidedly subpar. They mechanically use a rudimentary software system that is only capable of generating rough word-by-word renderings.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Sushi.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Sun-chieh Liang, a professor at National Taiwan Normal University, is currently completing the first Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake, for which he has created an entirely new multilingual Chinese lexicon. I would love to see how this turns out.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Anything in Cretan Linear A, by anyone.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
The sixteenth-seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci was the first to co-translate the Confucian classics into Latin, and also co-translated Euclid’s Elements into Chinese (apparently from memory, because he didn’t have the original text with him). If he were alive today, I’d be curious to see how he would translate it, into both Latin and classical Chinese, contemporary writings on theoretical physics, insofar as they approximate a perfect blending of cosmology and theology.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
I think it would be fun to translate Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables into Chinese (and simultaneously add more non-Western content).
Which work would you never translate and why?
Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing’s (1987-1991) work Book from the Sky consists of a room filled with texts printed in a traditional Chinese format. From a distance, the texts look like authentic pre-modern documents, but up-close it becomes evident that they contain about four thousand distinct Chinese characters, each of which was designed by the author to resemble actual Chinese characters, but which do not actually exist in Chinese and consequently have no semantic meaning.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
I have a particular fondness for badly subtitled bootleg Chinese movies. Often the translators clearly don’t understand the original dialogue, so they simply make up the translation as they go along.
Carlos Rojas is the translator of several modern Chinese novels including The Day the Sun Died, The Four Books: A Novel, and Lenin’s Kisses, all by Yan Lianke. He is also the author of Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China and The Great Wall: A Cultural History.
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Ingrid Rowland
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
As Giordano Bruno apparently said (in the words of one of his English friends), “by the helpe of translations, all sciences had their offspring.”
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Catching a colloquial spirit that will date the translation almost as soon as it’s done.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
The author of “The Vulcano’s, or Burning and fire-vomiting mountains, famous in the world and their remarkables collected for the most part from the Kircher’s Subterraneous world…”
What is your favorite work of translation?
Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets, even if they are fake translations. And an old Greek postcard with the caption “Donkey ridding. One of tourist’s best funs.”
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Anything by Google translate, except for restaurant menus: “hypocrite” rather than “truffle” for Italian “tartufo” is sheer genius, especially when “tartufo” also means the nose leather on a dog or cat!
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Italian ingegno.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Plato translating The Tempest into Attic Greek.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
Tibullus, by Gerard Manley Hopkins or Constantine Cavafy.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
Aeschylus would have no trouble with the elegant language of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Aristophanes’ Knights, into Elizabethan English—all those picturesque insults!
Which work would you never translate and why?
I would love to translate Andrea Camilleri’s Il birraio di Preston, but don’t see how anyone could transpose the regional dialects into another language.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
William Weaver’s translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose added his own warmth and humanity to a book I loved when I first read it, which I did in Italian. Then I read Il pendolo di Foucault, and realized what a chilly showoff Eco really was. William Weaver, who wore his erudition far more lightly, somehow managed to redeem Eco’s novel from its own author’s shortcomings.
Ingrid D. Rowland is author of From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town.
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David Shulman
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Impossible.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Stolid fidelity.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?Kalpana Bardhan. Her translation of A River Called Titash by Adwaita Mallabarman-- every word is right.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Peter Khoroche’s Once the Buddha was a Monkey (Arya-sura's Jataka-mala). But Frank J. Nisetich's Pindar is equally fine. Also Gregory Hayes’ Marcus Aurelius, as is Charles Hallisey's Therigatha.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
Thousand Hoods, by Viswanatha Satyanarayana, translated by a team of five translators led by C. Subba Rao. However, this is only one of a very long list.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Sanskrit tapas.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Diwan of Hafez by Peter Cole.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
The Naisadhiya-carita of Sriharsa by Gary Tubb.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
Isaac Babel's Odessa Stories, by Flaubert
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Poems of Osip Mandelstam, into Malayalam.
Which work would you never translate and why?
Vasucaritramu of Bhattumurti. Because it can't be done.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
Yael Renan's Hebrew translation of Joyce's Ulysses is vastly superior to the original.
David Shulman is the author of several books including Tamil: A Biography. He is the co-translator of the Telugu classic The Story of Manu by Allasani Peddana.
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Maria Tatar
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Like Keats, on first looking into Chapman’s Homer.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Faithfulness—I prefer a little infidelity though not so far as betrayal.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Borges.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Anna Karenina (Richard Peaver & Larissa Volokhonsky).
What is your least favorite work of translation?
All Quiet on the Western Front (A.W. Wheen).
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
Ungeziefer: what Gregor Samsa turns into in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis"
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Nabokov translating anything into English.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
1001 Nights —put Paolo Horta on it!
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues into English
Which work would you never translate and why?
George Lukács, History and Class Consciousness—I once spent an entire day translating one paragraph in it.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
Ralph Manheim made The Tin Drum brilliantly readable without making any compromises.
Maria Tatar is a renowned folklorist and translator of fairy tales, as well as the editor of The Fairest of them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters (Forthcoming, March 2020).
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Karel van der Toorn
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Curse of Babel.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
Vulgate. Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible.
What is your favorite work of translation?
William Arrowsmith's translations of Eugenio Montale's poetry.
Karel van der Toorn is the author of Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible.
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Vanamala Vishwanatha
In a word, what's your current mood about translations?
Upbeat.
What is the most overrated virtue of a translation?
As in life, so in translation, the most overrated virtue is fidelity.
Who is the most underrated translator, ancient or modern?
Since, translators have been, by definition, an underrated species across cultures uniformly, one is hard put to single out ONE.
What is your favorite work of translation?
Several:
A . Bollywood's ingenious translation of Shakespeare's work, Macbeth or The Merchant of Venice, into the unique contours of the Indian film, giving it 'a local habitation and a name'.
B. Kannada poet Kuvempu's faithful translation of Browning's 'Pied Piper of Hamlin' which has become a quintessential Kannada poem.
C. Last but not the least, however, perhaps, despite, why-ever-not, The Life of Harishchandra.
What is your least favorite work of translation?
The translation of that magical read Love in the Time of Cholera which has been translated AWAY as a Kannada novel shorn of all magic.
Which word have you found the hardest to translate to English?
The shifty Kannada word mana or manassu which, unable to make up its mind, keeps shifting at will its meaning from heart to mind to will, disorienting the translator about basic human anatomy.
If you could pair a translator with a work, in any source and target languages, who would you pair with which work?
Girish Karnad, that genius born to do theater, translating his own plays from Kannada to English and vice versa, with a sure feel for the pulse of the play.
Which work of ancient literature would most benefit from a modern translation and by whom?
The First poet of Kannada, Pampa's Vikramarjuna Vijaya, which is yet to be translated into English, by a gifted poet in English, in a collaborative translation with S. Settar, the best historian of Old Kannada.
Which modern work would most benefit from a translation by someone who lived in the past?
Henry James' ponderous and poetic English novel The Portrait of a Lady compressed into a moving and metaphor-rich Sanskrit kavya by Kalidasa, in the manner of Shakuntalam!
Which work would you love to translate and into which language?
The unmissable Akka Mahadevi in all her nudity, into English.
Which work would you never translate and why?
Joyce's Ulysses. The rambling, stream-of-consciousness style, though not by design, already marks much of the writing in Kannada! So why bother? The not-of-this world kind of poet Bendre's spell-binding poetry in Kannada, which does refuses to travel outside Kannada. If translated into English, it has the power of dis-spelling all illusions of translatability.
Is there a favorite translation that you prefer to the original, fiction or non-fiction?
The trend-setting B.M. Srikanthaiah’s 1926 collection of poems, English Geetagalu, which effortlessly translated and surpassed his choice of selected English Romantic and Victorian poetry.
Vanamala Vishwanatha is the translator of the Kannada classic The Life of Harishchandra by Raghavanka.
