“The human quality that a good translation gives evidence of is generosity: the generosity of imagination that can hear and respond to the voice of somebody else which speaks or spoke in another language and place and sometimes time; the generosity that tries to reproduce, in so far as it can, the qualities of that voice, not only the data of what is said, but the feelings, the attitudes, the nuances, the shifts, the hesitations, the intensities, and the degrees of intensities, that he or she hears in that voice of somebody else. What we hear in a good translation is not purely that voice of somebody else but also the voice of the translator registering that effort and its delight. It’s an activity which is at the same time selfless and not selfless. And when that voice of somebody else is the voice of someone great the delight in the effort is exalting, and the delight in that is one of the ways the voice of the translator himself enters in and is heard.“”
—
David Ferry, commenting on Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation by George Kalogeris
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