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our minds, as much great art does, but even more so. A recent
article published in the journal Science identified an increase in
empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence among
test subjects after they read literary fiction. To explain this effect,
the researchers hypothesized that “literary fiction often leaves
more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences
about characters and be
“Reading literature in
translation requires us
to open our minds, as
much great art does,
but even more so.”
sensitive to emotional
nuance and complexity”;
what, then, of the leaps
of imagination required
when confronting much
less familiar characters
and situations, and
attempting to perceive
their cultural and linguistic
context, further extending the empathic stretch Whether the
empathy effect of foreign fiction is greater or not, its translators
inherently multiply the opportunities for reading literary fiction
by unceasingly contributing to the array of works available to
read in English. For decades, classics in translation like Anna
Karenina and The Stranger have been included on many a high
school English class syllabus, not to mention The Iliad and The
Bible. Now graduates can find South Asian and Egyptian and
Vietnamese masterpieces on the shelves as well.
The Center for the Art of Translation is committed to
bringing these voices into English, often for the first time,
through the now biannual Two Lines journal of world writing
and through our newly launched Two Lines Press. Our interest
goes beyond publishing, however, to the various ways in which
translation can touch society, as an art form, as an education
tool, and through community events. As communities in the U.S.
become more diverse, it is no longer just the borders where we
need metaphorical bridges; more and more these gaps need to
be spanned within our own neighborhoods. Ironically, we have
found that translation allows us to know each other better, and
therefore feel more connected to one another, here at home.
In our Poetry Inside Out (PIO) education program, which
takes place in the often linguistically diverse classrooms of
our public schools, we teach students to translate great poems
from their original languages into English, and the poems we
select reflect the participants’ cultural and linguistic heritage.
In San Francisco, where there is a robust Japanese-American
community, students might begin by translating one of Matsuo
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National Endowment for the Arts