Frank Wynne

The translator as spy

Both professions involve double allegiances. The translator constantly plays two texts, two cultures and two readerships off against each other

issue 25 August 2018

  • Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto

    Mark Polizzotti

    MIT Press, pp. 200

Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically impossible, and though long since scientifically disproved, this factoid is still routinely trotted out. Similar pronouncements about the impossibility of translation have dogged practitioners since Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, published in 1424.

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