Winston also translates German prose, and while she doesn’t come close to her parents’ output, she does translate about one book a year in addition to being a professor of German at Wesleyan University. And her sister translates from Latin and Greek.
The only other translator I talked with who had a translator-parent is Rosanna Warren. Her mother, Eleanor Clark, translated from French, although far from full-time. Warren translates from French, Latin, and Greek (ancient and modern), also on the side; in addition, she runs the Translation Seminar at Boston University. The multilingual translator Willis Barnstone has collaborated on translations with both his son and his daughter, and both the father and the grandfather of the poet and sometime translator Rachel Hadas had also done translations themselves, but in no case was this a principal vocation. These are, in any event, exceptions to this curious rule that translators’ children, when translators can afford to have them, are not so taken with their parents’ vocation or avocation that they follow in their footsteps.
What makes people decide to become translators? Everybody knows why a writer writes. There have been many movies, and countless books about it. A writer has a story to tell, something to express, an urge to put his vision or her life or his anger or her passion down into words. A writer dreams of fame and fortune, the opening of opportunities, the fellowship of other writers, respect, celebrity, immortality.
Musicians fall in love with music, and study hard for many years, learning the great works by heart. Actors want to throw themselves into roles, go up on stage, become part of an exciting world, famous and adored. But a translator has no story to tell, nothing to express, no urge to get himself down into words. He cannot dream of either fame or fortune, or the opening of opportunities, or even, in most cases, the fellowship of other artists.
Yet some people do end up translating. The reasons they do this range from love to scholarship, from dissatisfaction to political necessity. Since for me one of the things that most distinguishes translation from other arts is the concept of service, I’ll start with Richard Howard’s reason: “there were some favorite books that I
loved, and I translated them so my friends could read them. There
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