On Not Reading in Translation

For more than thirty years, I've followed an unusual rule in my reading: not to read in translation any work I can read in the original. My motives for doing that aren't clear to me, and probably they're too deeply rooted for me to figure them out. The consequences, though, are clear, and of some interest; it turns out, in my view at any rate, that following this rule has given me a useful standpoint for thinking about what it means to read translations into one's own language, what it means to read texts in languages that aren't fully one's own, what conversations can take place between people doing the former sort of reading and people doing the latter.

I take my title from Virginia Woolf's beautiful essay "On Not Knowing Greek." In that essay, Woolf does two things. First, she shows us that we can't know Greek:

. . . it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys. . . . We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English. We cannot hear it, now dissonant, now harmonious, tossing sound from line to line across a page. We cannot pick up infallibly one by one all those minute signals by which a phrase is made to hint, to turn, to live.

Second, she shows us some...

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