It [translating] teaches the writer how to write in a way that nothing else can because you are inside of something. You’re not outside of it anymore. One can read something so closely that it’s only by translating it that you really do feel you’ve gone through the looking glass, that you are on the other side and you’re in that other world. I would wish that pleasure and education and marveling — that sense of amazement — for any writer.
(Excerpted from Why Jhumpa Lahiri loves translating Italy’s ‘finest living writer’)
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