Doing It Wrong

PITY THE TRANSLATOR of masterpieces. “We convince by our presence,” Walt Whitman wrote, suggesting that a work of art has to compel us on its own terms, even when we don’t immediately understand what those terms are. For the translator, however, the procedure of boiling down (and then reconstituting) such charisma turns out to be a tricky one. Words are words, but “presence” is a whole that, when examined closely, reveals itself to be both more and less than the sum of its parts.