Translators must accept failure (Berry)
July 22nd, 2007 | Published in Books & Reading, Poetry, Quotes, Writing
Translators of poetry must accept failure as the primary condition of their work. They must settle, at best, for second best: Their translations must succeed or fail as new poems in their own language which at the same time serve as approximations or shadows of the original poems. Nobody, I think, has ever believed that there was an equation between a translation and the original.
–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117