In Other Words

For all those who are interested in the sharp end of translated literature - the sheer, brain-mangling effort, the years of work and heartache that go into wrestling a text out of one language and into another - this, the journal of the British Centre for Literary Translation, is probably essential reading. I say 'probably', because, like most people, your reviewer here has no idea what it's like to be a translator: I let the professionals do the heavy-lifting (God help them) and then I sit back and enjoy the finished product. Nonetheless, this slim journal has to be one of the most inspiring, enlightening and downright interesting things I've read in a good long while.

This issue's theme is 'Translating the Sacred and Canonical'. The contributors - every one of them engaging, thoughtful and terrifyingly smart - are concerned with a problem that, in a way, is a distillation of the central issue of translation itself: how do you translate a sacred or privileged idiom into another language without losing the whole weight and significance of everything makes it, in its original form, so much more than the sum of its parts? How does a translator find a form of words commensurable to the complexity and profundity of the source text, in which every lexical or semantic turn bears an accretive weight of generations of exegesis, interpretation, disputation and reverence? As this issue proves, this is a dilemma that can apply to The Little Prince as easily as to the Qur'an.

The real treat, however, is the full text of this year's Sebald Lecture, in which Will Self reflects on the shadow of the Holocaust under which the late, great writer - himself the founder of the BCLT - constructed his intricate and hypnotic semi-fictions. This, too, is a matter of translating the sacred and untranslatable, of finding words with which to express things inexpressible in this or any other language. Self's essay is a vital piece of writing, infused with all the moral urgency and fearless intelligence of its subject: here's hoping it'll be reprinted elsewhere and reach the audience it deserves.