Translation as Art →

Padraig O’Tuama interviewed Karen Leeder, Oxford scholar and award-winning translator, for Poetry Unbound. It’s an excellent conversation, which ends with speaking of translation as a human act:

Well, translation is so human. I think, you know, we live in a world that tends towards the insular, tends towards the xenophobic, tends towards the inward looking, and translation is the opposite of all that. It’s a kind of political effort to explode those tendencies, and it’s now more necessary than ever.

And so I do believe in it as … I believe in it as art. I believe in it as political, necessarily political. And I believe in it as a kind of profoundly human activity, which goes back to what you were saying about we’re always constantly translating in our interactions … It’s a democratic thing, isn’t it, you know, when you can meet someone from a different experience, a different culture, a different way of thinking and outlook on the world, and you can find common ground in a kind of shared experience. So I think it’s, you know, it’s a kind of a poetry for peace. It’s … you can’t really bomb someone while you’re translating them.

In his weekly letter, Padraig says, in reference to that quote:

I like what Karen Leeder says, and even if it’s not always true, I wish it were, and I’d like to live in (and work towards) a world where it is more, and often, and entirely true.