Writing by translating
Juan Kruz Igerabide (Special supplement: Making the foreign one’s own)

Abstract

I have dedicated myself to writing by translating. I do not know how other people do it, but I believe it must be in much the same way. When you receive culture through a second language, you have no other choice. In the final analysis, when you sit down to write, you are essentially translating what you have assimilated from what you have received and experienced. Ever since languages were confused at the Tower of Babel, we have been translating ourselves and confusing ourselves, trying on the one hand to clarify messages, and on the other hand to preserve that individual obscurity that characterizes each of us.