Opera excepted, I never asked myself, in those early years of reading literature in translation, what I was missing. It was as if I felt it were my job, as a passionate reader, to see through the faults or limitations of a translation–as one sees through (or looks past) the scratches on a bad print of a beloved old film one is seeing once again. Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful. What–rather, who–would I be without Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?
–Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches
Dante and Primo Levi, Cervantes and Ernesto Cardenal, the Torah, the Prophets, and the Gospels; Tolstoy, Akhmatova and Dostoevsky; Goethe, Heine, Freud, Mann and Habermas; Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads; Anandamayi Ma and Tagore; Mahmoud Darwish and Dunya Mikhail; Proust and Sartre; Politkovskaya and Alexievich...
ReplyDeleteNot to mention the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, the Platform Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra, and the Dhammapada.
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