translation

Looking at the gaps between the words as you move from one language to another, and the way meaning disappears into the gaps — that experience is what I value most about translation. We operate all the time with language as if it says what we mean. It never does, but you don’t realize the flaccidity of that until you are actually trying to make one thing in one language into another language. It’s like being on a surface with a lot of cracks in it and looking down through the cracks to something like another world down there that you can almost see, almost express, but not quite. It’s frustrating in the sense that there’s an ideal understanding down there that’s not available but, on the other hand, it doubles reality because we don’t live in that ideal world, we live up here, and yet you can glimpse down through the cracks to that other thing.

Anne Carson
Interviewed by Kate Kellaway for The Guardian, Sunday 3oth October 2016