Sympathy for the Traitor

Resumen del libro

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't.

For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty -- summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering "faithful"? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a "traitor" but as the author's creative partner.

Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, "skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work." In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated -- something, as Goethe put it, "impossible, necessary, and important."

Biografía del autor

Mark Polizzotti es traductor al inglés de más de cincuenta libros, entre ellos obras de Patrick Modiano, Gustave Flaubert, Raymond Roussel, Marguerite Duras y Paul Virilio. En español ha publicado "Highway 61 revisited", traducido por Jorge Isusi, y "La vida de André Breton. Revolución de la mente", traducido por Juan José Utrilla y Gabriel Bernal Granados. En la actualidad es editor en el Metropolitan Museum of Art en Nueva York.