The power of the translator to break nations

No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ, since I’ve seen one: the handsome monument to the 12th-century scholar-physician Judah ibn Tibbon, ‘patriarch of translators’, beneath the Alhambra in Granada. But if the brokers between languages and cultures still lack many bronze or marble tributes, the books that celebrate their calling have begun to pile higher. A few of them retaliate against the downgrading of translation skills with a mystagogic tone which repels curious civilians. Which makes Anna Aslanyan’s wide-angled and reader-friendly tour of her profession’s many roles, in literature, politics, law, diplomacy, business and data science, all the more welcome and appealing.

Aslanyan, a Russian translator who plies her trade in courts and libraries alike, tells of one linguistic go-between who secured not a mere statue but an entire dynasty. The 17th-century fixer Alexander Mavrocordato was foremost among the Greek Christian dragomans who — in every sense — interpreted the Ottoman empire to the western powers and vice versa. The sultan’s polyglot ‘minister of secrets’, ‘a grandee and a schemer’, the Mavrocordato clan’s founder lived to see his son enthroned as prince of Wallachia and Moldavia. He greeted this elevation not as an honour but ‘the ruin of his family’. Dodging the limelight, Alexander knew, can be wise.

Aslanyan covers huge swathes of territory with a pleasantly light touch. She skips from the interpreter’s potentially world-shaking job in diplomacy and war to the modern mysteries of computer translation and ‘machine learning’, and the traffic between languages in science, law and religion, as well as the wrangles and pitfalls of literary translation.