What is translation if not an intimate act between two people, away from the eyes of the world? It might be the mirth of two sisters, suppressed at table: a mutual tautening, hands flitting to faces until the effect of the secret subsides. It might be an embrace. It might even be an angry struggle. The nature of the relationship between translator and writer depends on the text. But it is always a close one. I wanted Sylwia Siedlecka—whose circumstances seemed so near my own: she was about my age, also a linguist and an academic—to teach me the balancing act she had already mastered, wanted to get inside her defter imagination to plumb my own heartbreak. I decided to translate her book.
Source : The Daily Alchemy of Translation
