Well, not literally, but certainly in a sense that is more than figurative. Because I have been privileged to translate great books by both of these men, I’ve had the immense pleasure of spending long periods of time alone with them, pondering how they put their sentences together, how their voices resonate in the mind’s ear, how their thoughts and emotions emerge from the page to take on a three-dimensional solidity that seems to envelop and embrace the reader. By now it is a cliché, at least in translating circles, to talk about how closely translators read the works they bring over into another language and how profoundly they come to know the intricacies of each text, but generally left unsaid is any mention of the deep intimacy that close reading creates between author and translator.

The late Ralph Manheim, the eminent translator of German, once said that a translator is like an actor who speaks the author’s lines as the author would if he or she could speak English. Consider the interpenetration of sensibilities required for the actor/translator to speak those lines. We translators engage with our authors in a kind of Vulcan mind-meld that has little to do with 1960s television, Star Trek, or Mr. Spok. Whether it lies entirely outside the realm of science fiction is another question altogether, but the kind of empathic and empathetic identification necessary for that melding to happen – for actors to take on the psyches of their characters or for translators to write the world through the eyes of their authors – is not too different from the kinds of feelings that give rise to a close relationship with another person.

Not long after my translation of Don Quixote was published, I took part in a panel discussion of that wonderful novel and the difficulties inherent in bringing a 17th century book (not just any wonderful 17th century book but the foundation of the modern novel, one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and the Ur-text of all literature in Spanish) into the modern world four centuries later in another language. At some point the conversation devolved into talk about Miguel de Cervantes and not Don Quixote, and I found myself stating for all the world to hear that Cervantes was clearly one of the most attractive men who had ever lived and that I deeply regretted not being able to spend an evening with him having a great meal, drinking superb wine, and talking about whatever he might care to talk about. Was I half in love with the shade of a dead writer? Yes, of course I was. The personage named Cervantes hovering there behind the pages of Don Quixote was companionable and compassionate and clearly enamored of his two central characters in spite of all the lost teeth and beatings and humiliations he subjected them to in the course of the novel. More.

See: English PEN’s World Bookshelf

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