Wall, Steegmuller and Hopkins all get this. The impossible, of course.



For a start, you would probably want it not to read like ‘a translation’.





Source Citation 3) He grew like a young oak-tree.
View the list Read in order to live. la grotte. Writer-translators with their own style and worldview might become fretful at the necessary self-abnegation; on the other hand, disguising oneself as another writer is an act of the imagination, and perhaps easier for the better writer. 191-94.

Source Citation So if Rick Moody tells us that Lydia Davis is ‘the best prose stylist in America’, and Jonathan Franzen that ‘few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,’ does this make her better or worse equipped to render the best prose stylist of 19th-century France into 21st-century American English? © LRB (London) Ltd 1980 - 2020. (It is also slightly baffling: where else might you feel wine if not in your mouth? Source Citation Both Steegmuller and Hopkins diminish the line by recasting it, and even Wall, who is closest to Davis, misses out the necessary, intensifying ‘all’. Source Citation I am grateful to James Fenton and the Salamander Press for permission to reprint the lines from 'A German Requiem' on page 115.

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That perfect translator must be a writer able to subsume him or herself into the greater writer’s text and identity. Imagine that you are about to read a great French novel for the first time, and can only do so in your native English. Source Citation Knife, little knife or penknife? Source Citation

Though regarded in France as one of that country’s greatest poets, he is better known abroad for such novels as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) and Les Miserables (1862).

He acquired strong hands and a good colour.