A short history of translation and translators

In the 20th century

• In the 20th century
• Aniela Zagórska, a Polish translator, translated from 1923 to 1939 nearly all the works of her uncle Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British novelist who wrote in English. In Conrad’s view, translation, like other arts, involved choice, and choice implied interpretation. Conrad would later advise his niece: “Don’t trouble to be too scrupulous. I may tell you that in my opinion it is better to interpret than to translate. It is, then, a question of finding the equivalent expressions. And there, my dear, I beg you to let yourself be guided more by your temperament than by a strict conscience” (cited in Zdzisław Najder, “Joseph Conrad: A Life”, 2007).
• Jorge Luis Borges, an Argentine writer, essayist and poet, was also a notable translator of literary works from English, French and German to Spanish in the 1960s. He translated — while subtly transforming — the works of William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, and others. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, “holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid” (Wikipedia).