One might guess that growing up bilingual—being forced, in effect, to translate in one’s head as a natural part of life—would be a good start for a translator, but this is not the way most translators begin, and many feel that it is in fact an obstacle. Actually, multilingual people tend not to translate in their heads, but rather deal with their languages in separate compartments. However, Richard Sieburth, a translator from French and German and professor at New York University, does credit his growing up in a bilingual household (German and English) in a quadrilingual country, Switzerland: “Very early on, you realize that everything has two names and you’re living in a double universe. And then being in a country where every product you looked at, your breakfast muesli, everything was in four languages. And absolutely being fascinated by that kind of polyphony, by that plurality of messages.”
But once he began to actually do literary translation as an undergraduate, other factors came in to play. “Translation was a way of miming or writing the kind of text you couldn’t write yourself.” He started out translating a couple of novels by Georges Bataille “for fun,” and then as a graduate student and young professor he did translations for literary magazines.
Sieburth himself feels that “bilinguals are often the worst translators. You need that solid anchoring in one language, precisely because you need to respond to the foreignness; with bilinguals that tension gets lost. That tension needs to be maintained.” Robert Penn Warren once observed that “those outside of the language, like himself, could appreciate its musicality more than a native speaker— precisely because the outside reader would tend to focus more on (exotic) sound than sense.”*
American writers lack one principal reason for becoming a translator: suppression. Many foreign writers have turned to translation when their authoritarian government prevented them from publishing their own writing. This is true of Stanislaw Baranczak, now a professor of Polish at Harvard and a translator into Polish of Shakespeare, Donne, Dickinson, and a wide range of other English-language poets. It was also true of Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet who was a dissident to fascism in the thirties.
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas is said to have spent his years as a political prisoner translating Paradise Lost into Serbo-Croatian,
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