Alan Shapiro: Translation as Linguistic Hospitality (July 2009)

“If failure and betrayal are inevitable” in translation, Alan Shapiro asks, “how do we fail and betray in interesting and illuminating ways?”  Shapiro draws on his own experiences translating The Oresteia, as well as on translations of that work by Robert Browning and Robert Fagles, to explore the challenges facing any translator and to advocate the idea of hospitality as a productive way to think about translation.