Many Voices: A Life in Translation
“When we first learn to speak as children, we are learning to translate.”—Octavio Paz
One of the first authors I translated, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, said that I had “too much ego” to be a translator. I took the statement as a compliment even though I still don’t know if it’s true. What I do know is that author and translator both need to be writers. To begin at the beginning: I read somewhere:
[T]he greatest human yearning is to recover the sense of belonging and possibility that attaches to childhood, that ghostly sensation of how it felt when life was most promising, simpler but more mysterious, at a time when things were vivid because they were first impressions. It is the memory of expectation that lies at the bottom of all our lives. That is what I love, what I am forever seeking.