Translations are overwhelmingly valuable, necessary culture-building. According to paulo da costa, “There is an inherent acceptance that no translator can possibly speak on behalf of another without missing or adding variables to the equation of understanding; therefore approximation is a condition of engagement” (“translating text, translating self,” p. 115). He speaks personally for a more literal approach: “I see merit in not reshaping the music of an original text to the rhythm of a target language” (“The Music of Translation,” p. 15). Further, he says he is “a reader who appreciates the strangeness conveyed in the sound and structure of a foreign text.”

The contributors cited, and those who were not, generously share how they court the ‘poetry’ of the text and why they do it…. and in that spirit, the essays in Beyond Words: Translating the World bring together translators, writers and serious readers, all lovers of the word, philologists to the core.

On the other end of the spectrum, André Gabastou wishes all young translators “be free of the shackles restraining translation, namely that the translated text must be faithful to the original” (“How to Jettison a Surfeit of Theory,” p. 123). Edith Grossman writes “that my primary obligation as a literary translator is to re-create for the reader in English the experience of the reader in Spanish” (“Translating Don Quixote,” p. 134). Also inhabiting the literary end of the continuum, Francoise Roy takes up practical matters such as the number of monosyllables and particles in French, the possibility of omitting a subject in Spanish, what she calls “the rich ambiguity characteristic of Spanish to the filigreed precision of French” (“Poetry Translation: Mission Impossible or a Question of Skill?” p. 83). She endorses sonority, rather than strangeness in the target text, with translators “reproducing meaning with non-cacophonous sounds that play with rhythm and lead to an engaging sonority in the target language” (p. 79).

With the idea of consonance, Carmen Leñero finds an antidote to traduttore, traditore by “adding a second voice to the poem’s diction and even a second line as counterpoint…; in other words, proposing a new musicality that intertwines with the original musicality of the poem, its counterpart” (“Seeking a Twin Voice: Translating and Singing Lorna Crozier’s Poems,” p. 51). When all is said and done, however, Katherine Silver provides a best-case scenario for translators:

The contributors cited, and those who were not, generously share how they court the “poetry” of the text and why they do it. At the book’s outset, Sara Fruner asks us to consider “how unsubstantial a line there is between translators and writers” (p. 4). Hélène Rioux widens the circle: “The reader is another translator, adding his or her own experience and understanding of the words to the author’s, and so on in an infinite chain of metamorphosis (“Translation: Music, Ethics,” p. 139). Yes! And in that spirit, the essays in Beyond Words: Translating the World bring together translators, writers and serious readers, all lovers of the word, philologists to the core.