Late last year, the Queen Sofía Institute in New York invited me to do, for a few minutes, something I would happily do for hours on end: talk about translation and translators. The occasion was the awards ceremony for a prize the institute organizes to honor the best translation from Spanish to English in the United States. The 2023 prize was won—and deservedly so—by the translator Charlotte Whittle, who recreated El infinito en un junco in English as Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Irene Vallejo’s beautiful book discusses, among a thousand different things (all of them interesting), the historical importance of translation. I have always believed in the relevance and even necessity of taking every opportunity to publicly declare our gratitude to translators, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that all of them are responsible for a great part of what we mean when we say: I am human.

Allow me to begin with a declaration of principles: if we read and write literature, I believe, it is due to a feeling of dissatisfaction. The life we have to live is not enough for us; we rebel against the fact that we get just one life, in the sense that we don’t have another after this one, but also against the confinement inside a single identity, a single place in the world, a unique point of view from which to look at the world until death. This is frustrating because we always want to live and know more: we want to have other lives. Literature is a remedy (an imperfect one, but we have no other for the moment) for these deprivations; anyhow, translation takes this privilege one step further, and gives us the gift of access to even more different, even more remote lives, or bridges the abyss that separates us from those distant lives. That’s why I can say that my vision of the world, my morals, my comprehension of what we are as human beings, has been molded by Homer and Tolstoy, by Aristotle and Chekhov, despite not speaking a word of Greek or Russian. I have often said that without translation I would not be able to talk about my Colombian reality, because to do so I need two words that once upon a time were translated from Greek: politician and idiot. You see: translation enriches our comprehension of life.

For several years I earned my living as a translator, and I have always thought there is no better school for an apprentice writer than literary translation. The equation is very simple: we learn to write by reading, and translators are the best readers in the world. A good translator understands all the intents and purposes; like a good impersonator, she can do all the voices. A good translator also recognizes all the shortcuts, all the snares, all the cheap tricks, and this, for a translated writer, is an invaluable incentive. (More than once I have reworked a sentence with its translators in mind: to make it better or clearer, not lazy or self-indulgent: making sure it is worthy of their attention and their talent.) Finally, translators are the best error detectives. Their emails cause me real panic, for they are the tangible proof that, no matter how many times you proofread a manuscript, there will always be some mistake that will only become visible—to the author’s enormous despair—once the book is already published and in the process of being translated. But Borges used to say that his first reading of Don Quixote had been in English, and that later, when he read the original in Spanish, he thought it was a mediocre translation. I don’t know why, but this anecdote consoles me.

The Queen Sofía prize honors, as I said, a translation from Spanish to English. No one can be better aware of the importance of translation than a Latin American novelist, for our novel reached maturity, at least in part, thanks to certain translated discoveries. García Márquez would not have written what he wrote had he not discovered Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, that strange annunciation of magic realism, or Faulkner and Hemingway and Albert Camus: all books and authors he read in translation (and many published by the great Victoria Ocampo, who I’ll have to talk about in another article). The same can be said in the opposite direction: without Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or without Norman Di Giovanni’s of the works of Borges, a whole generation of North American novelists would be more difficult to imagine: Toni Morrison and John Barth come to mind. But many others too: The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides, is an admirable novel that would be inconceivable without Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

I mean that translation is, among many other things, a possible antidote against closed-mindedness and xenophobia of the spirit. Translation broadens our sense of what human beings are, what they say and think and feel; also, what language does to the world. Gregory Rabassa says that something like Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty may be applicable to translation: “every time we call a stone a pierre,” he writes, “we have somehow made it different from a stone or a Stein.” I don’t know about you, but to me this seems frankly magical. Many years ago I talked it over with Javier Marías, one of the great novelist-translators of our language, who published his rendition of Tristram Shandy when he was in his early twenties, and later produced Spanish versions of works by Joseph Conrad and Isak Dinesen. Marías told me that the most mysterious aspect of translation is the simple circumstance of our acceptance of it. How can a text still be the same after losing all that has made it possible, which is the language? How can we feel we’ve read W. G. Sebald or Thomas Bernhard, those of us who do not know German, when not a single one of the words in the translated text is the decision of the author? We are aware as we are reading that the words are by Miguel Sáenz (or Anthea Bell, Michael Hulse, Martin Chalmers, Ewald Osers, Michael Hofmann, etc.) and nevertheless we go on thinking: I am reading Bernhard, reading Sebald, reading Joseph Roth.

This has a corollary: good translations make the translator disappear; bad ones make them visible. Maybe there is some truth in the cliché, and good translators might be invisible in the work. However, I believe, and with complete conviction, that they should be very visible, as visible as possible, in our society of readers. Or of citizens, indeed, because that is also what translations, their presence in our societies or our sustained contact with them, indirectly create. Yes, it’s true: translators’ names should be on the covers of books. And it’s true: they must be better paid. And it’s true: the industry, this publishing industry that depends on them, must begin now to protect them from the uncontrolled onslaughts from what we call artificial intelligence, which could very well be the greatest step backward that human beings have taken. And we readers of literature should give our thanks to these invisible figures, telling them every once in a while that we see and recognize and appreciate them.