Translators are often in the shadows, but they contribute in an essential way to the appreciation of a work. To translate a book is first of all to respect a text, to love it, to interpret it without betraying it.
Behind the numbers, what does the act of translation represent? It is never literal. But should it be seen as a creation? It is not limited to translating an author’s text word for word, but rather to taming it intimately to capture its full scope and nuances.

To bring to life the harmony of his sentences and to reproduce it in another language. A translator must follow the author’s way of writing. It is a love story, it is the link that unites him to the text on which he works. Intuition plays a key role because a mystery hovers around the work, this mystery, the translator must make his own. Translating is re-creating. The translation process will be creative in itself. Adding creation to creation is the richness of the system, but also its limit. Because a translation must be pragmatic before being aesthetic. Sometimes a successful translation puts an end to all other forms of attempts. A translation is not creative for the sole reason that it concerns a literary creation. But because it is the result of a process carried out by an author who himself claims creativity.

There is a double mastery in the act of translating. That of understanding and appropriating the written word, and that of transcribing it. This work of writing only “rebuilds” itself in translation. It is also something that paradoxically resembles the art of writing. And yet translation could be considered a minor art, the opposite of creation: repetition. The art of the translator is ambiguous; it lies at the centre of opposing tensions between the need to reproduce and the need to recreate itself. Prosaically, to translate a text well, it is necessary to make a detailed analytical reading of it, locating the time at which it was written. For a tongue is in perpetual motion. Particular vigilance must be attached to the point of view of the narrator, to the movements in time, to the characters, to the circumstances, to the places. The spirit of the text must be captured.

Translation is and will always be a form of art. What better way to sublimate a book than translation?