The Art of Empathy Translation

My RecommendationsLove in the Time of Choleraby Gabriel García Márquez,translated from the Spanish byEdith Grossman.Grossman succeeded in recreatingthe refined levels of humor in hertranslation of the novel. A certainmusical air carries the translationfrom the beginning to the end.The Tin Drum by Günter Grass,translated from the German byBreon Mitchell.This translation is a marvelousexample of how a translator wasable to reproduce the delicatevibrations of the details hiddenin each corner of the novel.Mitchell’s afterword to histranslation is one of the mostinsightful reproductions of thetranslation process that I haveever read.Chronicles of Hell by Michel deGhelderode, translated from theFrench by George Hauger.Translating plays requires agood ear to recreate the rangeof different voices. Haugerhas succeeded in sculpting thedifferent energetic outbursts ofthe characters. His translation haslargely contributed to the successof this play in the English-speakingworld.to think ourselves into thesituation on the other side ofthe bridge. A willingness toembrace the other accompaniesthe walk across the bridge,and the translators undergoa transformation. They nolonger insist that their way oflooking at their own worldis the only one. They adopt asense of openness toward thesituations at the end of thebridge. Translation becomes anencounter with the other, nota confrontation. Translatorsundertake a strange voyage;there is no final arrival point.They never stop crossing thebridge, since they constantlylink one moment to the other,one word to the other, onethought to the other, and oneimage to the other. Translatorsnever come to rest; they areconstantly in two places atthe same time by buildingassociations that carry theforeign into the known of theirown language.And in that process, boththe source-language text andthe receptor-language textundergo a transformation.Translation is neither thesource language nor thereceptor language, but thetransformation that takes placein between. That constantbeing at two places at the sametime develops what I refer to asassociative thinking. In otherwords, the translator is alwaysengaged in a never-endingdialogue with the work under54National Endowment for the Arts