“Last year, when I had the pleasure of translating Cuban writer Abilio Estévez’s first novel Tuyo es el reino (Thine Is the Kingdom) from Spanish into English, it occurred to me that much has been written about the difficulties of translation but little about its joys.1 The 300-plus pages of this luminously written work allowed me to tackle one of the great challenges of literary translation: how to find a balance among the various registers of an author’s voice, capturing the musicality of the words as sounds (their meter and alliteration) while making accessible the cultural and historical allusions of the text. Working on Thine Is the Kingdom, written in a Baroque style and replete with images from Cuban and European art, literature, and history, in many ways was like solving an enormous crossword puzzle. The solution I offered in one place limited the solutions I was able to use in half-a-dozen others.”
This is the beginning of an essay, “The Joy of Translation” (click for a link to the full article, pdf) published in the Journal of the International Institute in Winter 2000.
