Translation made Susan Sontag who she is. "Translations were a gift, for which I would always be grateful," says she. "What--rather, who--would I be without Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Chekhov?"
Then comes this paragraph:
My sense of what literature can be, my reverence for the practice of literature as a vocation, and my identification of the vocation of the writer with the exercise of freedom--all these constituent elements of my sensibility are inconceivable without the books I read in translation from an early age. Literature was mental travel: travel into the past... and to other countries. (Literature was the vehicle that could take you ANYWHERE.) And literature was criticism of one's own reality, in the light of a better standard.
Susan Sontag, At the Same Time (2007)
Criticism of life by way of others' reflexions. Translation and transformation of the self occuring at the same time. This practice, in its totality, is called literature. But then, the practice of learning foreign languages, in its totality, is also nothing less than literature.
