Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei - Eliot Weinberger, Octavio Paz

Unless we have a mind of God, or hundreds of years at our disposal (fat chance), we may never fluently learn all languages whose literature attracts us. Some try, and the effort is noble, but somewhere along the way, even the most intrepid of polyglots will succumb to the necessity of translation as a gateway to original, illusive sources. Since the apocryphal fall of the Tower of Babel, and the concomitant scattering of tongues, translation has been the only way to divine meaning of foreign languages, and for better or worse, it is the sole handmaiden of Truth, however lopsided, subjective ... more