Crossing Borders ─ Stories and Essays About Translation

In Today's Towers of Babel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz has assembled sixteen stories and essays by prominent fiction writers and translators about the way in which translation operates in our lives. We come to see that translation lends itself to a wide variety of metaphorical uses, among them misunderstandings in love, war, and other major life events. In Joyce Carol Oates's story "The Translator," a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter, but when he gets a new interpreter, the woman becomes a stranger and his love for her evaporates. In Lydia Davis's playful "French Lesson I: Le Meurtre," what begins as an innocuous lesson in beginner's French soon hints at something more sinister. And in the essay "On Translating and Being Translated," Primo Levi addresses the dangers and difficulties awaiting the translator, concluding that each translation invariably loses something of the original, but it is worth doing anyway. Ultimately the stories and essays in this collection are about no less than communication itself: its limitations, its rewards, and above all its importance in today's rapidly shrinking world.

LYNNE SHARON-SCHWARTZ is the author of twenty-four books, three short story collections, three essay collections, two books of poetry, and three translations from Italian. Among them are the novels Rough Strife (nominated for a National Book Award) and Leaving Brooklyn (nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction), and the memoirs Ruined by Reading and Not Now, Voyager. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA in fiction and translation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington Writing Seminars and Columbia University's School of the Arts, and has taught in many other places both in the US and abroad.