fwriction

Brought to my attention by Dave Smith, a multi-talented ass-kicker of brilliance (both as a writer and as a distiller), this piece by The Hours author Michael Cunningham furthers my interest in current obsession, translation:

“Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.”