In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound asserts, “A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.” The reason for that, Pound explains, is because “the sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”1 Pound's adage and accompanying explanation sound reasonable enough: translation brings to the target language new ideas, new expressions, and new ways in which we learn, to borrow a phrase from J. L. Austin, “how to do things with words.”2 Thus, we hear A. L. Becker, in Beyond Translation, echoing the Spanish philosopher and philologist Jose Ortega y Gasset by suggesting, “Translation is a matter of saying in a language precisely what that language tends to pass over in silence.”3
Translation as Citation by Haun Saussy, however, casts most of these...
