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The Amazing Literary Translators Who Make Our World a Better Place
They don’t get the recognition they deserve
In a recent story offering ten reading challenges for fall, I included one called “Around the World in 80 Books,” in which you travel the world by reading books translated into English from other languages. I’ve mentioned both this challenge and my love of books in translation before. What I have not talked enough about is the talented translators who make it possible for me to move beyond the one language I (barely) know and into worlds I would never experience otherwise.
The most obvious example of this is something everyone who has read my bookish articles already knows about. After Ernest Hemingway, my favorite author is Carlos Ruiz Zafon, the Spanish novelist who gave us The Shadow of the Wind. But since I do not speak Spanish (except to order food and beer), neither I nor any other non-Spanish speaker would have ever read his magical words if not for the woman acknowledge by a single line under Zafon’s name on the title page: Translated by Lucia Graves.
Few readers ever even notice that single, crucial line. We care about the story and, to a lesser degree, the author of the novel, not the person who took that story and put it into our language. If we think of them at all, we see the translator as a…
