Some fifteen years ago, after I had been translating for three or four years and thought—a little prematurely it turned out—that I knew what I was doing, I wrote an article in which I made a claim for translation as a certain kind of literary criticism: literary criticism in its text-analysis modality. Basically, I said that in the process of textual analysis that goes into the translation, the first thing and the last thing the translator-cum-literary critic needed to do was look closely at the text, the words on the page, and when that written text had been absorbed, its stylistic peculiarities and tics analyzed and understood, the translator’s job was virtually done, because everything else followed from that. My approach to translation then, and in fact my approach to translation now, is that I attempt to reproduce in the translation the markers of style that I identify in the source text.
