Translators on Translation : Portraits of the Art

This is a book in pursuit of translators’ philosophies or personal theories of translation. From Vladimir Nabokov and William Carlos Williams to Ursula K. Le Guin and Langston Hughes, Translators on Translation coaxes each subject’s reflections on their art, their particular view of translation, and how they carry out their specific form of translation.

The translators’ intellectual biographies expand our understanding of their views, often in their own words, on the aesthetic, political, and philosophical nature of translation; lend insight into their translation decision-making on specific works; afford critical summaries and contextualizations of their key theoretical and theoretico-practical works; unearth their figurative conceptualizations of translation; and construct their subject identities. As a person’s body of work can be diffuse, scattered, fragmentary, and contradictory, inner lives have to be constructed and reconstructed. Through a recovery and narrativizing of their writing and speaking on translation, their interviews, paratextual commentary, letters, lecture notes, and even fiction and poetry, these late twentieth-century subjects answer the question, What is translation to you?

The book is supported by additional translators’ profiles and selected translations on the Routledge Translation Studies portal. Translators on Translation is key reading for courses on translation practice, translation history, translation theory, and creative writing courses that engage in translation while also being vital reading for practicing literary translators.