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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that.
The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!
My mom's a translator, my dad's a woodworker; that's the world I grew up in, that's the world I'm most comfortable in. The whole idea of Hollywood or any of that other stuff that unfortunately goes along with film, that wasn't part of my upbringing, thankfully.
When I was 16 years old, I assembled a 2.3 million electron volt beta particle accelerator. I went to Westinghouse, I got 400 pounds of translator steel, 22 miles of copper wire, and I assembled a 6-kilowatt, 2.3 million electron accelerator in the garage.
The novelist's intuition for the sacred differs from the translator's interrogation of the sacred.
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.
I have two friends named Matt. They're both scouts in the cavalry. They both served in the same section of Iraq. They both worked with the same Iraqi translator. And yet, if you talk to them, their stories couldn't be more different, because one was there in 2006. One was there in 2008.
