God grant me
The serenity to accept
The things I cannot translate,
Courage
To translate the things I can,
And wisdom always
To tell the difference.
Zoltán Pék's prayer for translation
Zoltán Pék
God grant me
The serenity to accept
The things I cannot translate,
Courage
To translate the things I can,
And wisdom always
To tell the difference.
A translator is a professional schizophrenic, continuously wandering on the edge, risking his sanity in the crashing zone of two languages and two cultures. He is operating in an elevated state of mind, as if in trance––indeed, it is a creative trance, a state of bipolarity, of being at two places simultaneously, moving parallel in two worlds. In this sense, he is an exotic stranger, an itinerant of the ever-growing literary world. Invisibly, condemned to solitude, he enters this atypical state of awareness, becomes a trance-later.