French writer and translator Frederic Boyer on the art of translation:
Any literary translation is an appropriation that produces something original. I have translated (the Bible, Shakespeare, Saint Augustine, the Song of Roland …) in order to become someone else, to grab and transform the heritage that was allegedly reserved for me. My need to translate was not primarily cultural or linguistic but rather a need for an internal rupture.
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To translate is to confront the authority of a text, of its language and culture, and of previous translations that often wield the power of legal precedents.
Every culture has its ghosts, and to translate is to lure those ghosts back to life and back to our world, to make the past speak in the present. For me, translating is never simply to receive something and to pass it on or transmit it, but rather, in some vital way, to recall it, to appropriate it, to join forces with it, to become one with it for a time and to subject my writing to the test of this other horizon.
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For me, the act of translation is a quasi-shamanistic act linking different worlds and different times.