Translators on Translation

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.