May
27
“I think you do need empathy, but I resist the familiar notion that the translator somehow becomes the author, or has some sort of special telepathic relationship with the author. Frankly, I think that’s a bit presumptuous and grandiose, and it obscures the delicate process by which the translator adjusts his or her own voice to the author’s voice. It requires a kind of harmonizing, by which I mean that the translator must find a tone in her own register that somehow suits the author’s. It is easier, at least for me, to translate an author or a character for whom I have a natural affinity.”
Translating Sex | Granta Magazine. Natasha Wimmer’s tranlsations of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 have both featured on the New York Times’s ‘Ten Best Books of the Year’ lists. She spoke to Ollie Brock about the eerie but oddly touching world of Bolaño’s prose, as well as the unique atmosphere of his sex scenes.
