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Engaging the World
Susan Harris
When people talk about literature
in translation, they often invoke
the classics. Without translation,
they note, most of us would
not be able to read Chekhov,
Flaubert, Homer; we would
have no access to Goethe, to
Dante, no knowledge of Norse
mythology or the Arabian
Nights. While indisputable,
this argument can have the
effect of compartmentalizing (if
not marginalizing) translated
literature as historical rather
than artistic, encountered in a
largely academic environment,
useful primarily for canonical purposes but not particularly
relevant to contemporary life. But literature, with its crucial
insight into world events from a human perspective, provides
an incomparable link to culture from within, and is ever more
valuable in establishing context and filling the lacunae in news
reports. And in our largely monolingual country, where foreignlanguage
fluency is the exception rather than the rule, that link,
and that context, are accessible only through translation. The
inability to read foreign languages, and the corresponding lack
of access to literature written in anything but English, may be the
ultimate “first-world problem,” one that reflects our insularity
and isolation, and perpetuates our restricted knowledge of the
rest of the world.
Everything we read is mediated at some point between
source and delivery, and the greater the distance to the primary
source, the greater the power those mediators have to shape
and distort information. When that information is further
compromised by outside perspectives, often perpetuating
earlier misconceptions and generalizations, and when
both language and geographical barriers preclude direct
investigation, we can end up with simplistic abstractions that
lead to lack of understanding, fear, and worse. To combat this
situation, Words without Borders (WWB) works to promote
cultural understanding through the translation, publication,
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation
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