A dialogue between the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee and his translator colleague Marina Dimópulos, has much to say on the thorny issue of translation.

Speaking in Tongues
J.M. COETZEE AND MARIANA DIMÓPULOS

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Translation is not always satisfactory. Cervantes compared it to the reverse side of a tapestry, a disappointingly knotty and ragged version of the original. In 1982 the writer Primo Levi accepted a commission to translate Kafka’s The Trial into Italian. Far from absorbing him in pleasurable work, he found in it only darkness, and a squeamish distaste for the physical world that pitched him into a depression. He resolved to remove the knots and occasional opaqueness from Kafka’s German, but in the process of “clarifying” The Trial he culpably misconstrued the original. On publication, one critic complained that Levi had grafted an “alien” optimism on to The Trial. (As the Italian proverb has it: traduttori, traditori, “translators are traitors”.)

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