Without translators, world literature would not exist. García Márquez did not become García Márquez in English until Gregory Rabassa found the right register for his sentences. Kafka barely existed in English until Edwin and Willa Muir spent decades on his prose. The translator is not a servant of the text but its second author.
The Great Translators
Gregory Rabassa translated García Márquez, Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, and much of the Latin American Boom into English. García Márquez famously said Rabassa's version of One Hundred Years of Solitude was better than his original. Edith Grossman translated Cervantes' Don Quixote (2003) — the most celebrated English rendering of the century. Anthea Bell gave English readers Kafka and W.G. Sebald.
The Translation Debate
Should a translator be faithful or beautiful? Eugene Nida's concept of "dynamic equivalence" argues for naturalness in the target language. Vladimir Nabokov's famously literal Pushkin translation argues for the opposite. Most great translators navigate between these poles case by case.
The New Translators
Today, Deborah Smith (who brought Han Kang to English), Lydia Davis (who retranslated Flaubert and Proust), and Amanda Hopkinson are recognized as creative artists in their own right, not merely conduits.
Explore world literature in translation on the Genesis of Literary world map.