Faulkner and Translation‪.‬

Every language offers its own reading of life.--George Steiner, After Babel (498) All of the essays in this special issue, Faulkner: Beyond the United States, deal with the complex subject of literary translation. Until very recently, the translator has been, if not entirely invisible, somewhat removed from the center of academic and intellectual discourse, the work of translation understood at best as a rather straightforward kind of labor and at worst as a form of betrayal. "Traduttore traditore" goes the famous riposte of the Italians in the face of the flourishing of French translations of Dante in the sixteenth century. That something is always "lost in translation" is a commonplace. But translation can also give back: as George Steiner has noted, "it can provide the original with a persistence and a geographical-cultural range of survival which it would otherwise lack," "it can make a general force of texts written in a local tongue," "it can illuminate, compelling the original into reluctant clarity," and it can "reveal the stature of a body of work which had been undervalued or ignored in its native guise: Faulkner," Steiner observes, "returned to American awareness after he had been translated and critically acclaimed in France" (416).