Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/18

 should be known in Spanish. You see: it was desire, love—and with love, the desire for participation.”* As you will see again and again throughout this book—to the point where you might even begin to believe it—love is in translation, as in so many other (but too few) parts of life, the moving force. But what about “participation”? Was Paz, although fluent in English, not quite saying what he meant to say? I don’t think so; Paz is too much in love with words to make a mistake about something as important to him as his reason for translating. Richard Howard’s first reason for translating was to share his passions with his friends; Paz’s was to participate in a worldwide sharing of literatures. They amount to the same thing, just a different view, a different scale. Howard was being personal, Paz philosophical.

One thing that does not attract people to literary translation is the pay. In fact, there’s nothing translators complain about more than the money they don’t make from their work. Artists in general do not make as much money as they would like, but many performing artists, at least, get regular or full-time work, often with union wages and protections, and all can look at the great successes and tell themselves, I can do that, I’m that good, if only. . . With so few exceptions they prove the rule, literary translators do not have fulltime work, and jobs are not enough, because there’s no Translators Equity to make one or two good jobs a year enough to make a living. And translators have no great successes, in the monetary sense, to dream about becoming. Try to take a deep breath and imagine you’re William Weaver, English-language translator of Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and other Italian novelists, one of the giants in his field. Well, he has only scored big once: with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which paid for his current apartment. Even Weaver supplements his regular translation income by teaching translation and by writing about opera. Oh yes, artists also can supplement their income by teaching. But there are very few translation courses around, and not many universities try to attract translators to their campuses the way they do with writers and musicians. No, when translators teach, they usually teach language and literature courses. And they either fight for tenure like everybody else or accept the low pay and status that go with