"The translator's task is to create, in his or her own language, the same tensions appearing in the original. That's hard!"
About this Quote
Puig zeroes in on what most people politely ignore about translation: it is not a courier service for meaning. It is drama. By naming "tensions" rather than "messages", he points to the true engine of a text - its frictions between voices, classes, genders, registers; the way a sentence can flirt and accuse at the same time, or sound glamorous while hiding cruelty. Those pressures are what make prose feel alive. And they are exactly what evaporate when translation is treated like clean transcription.
The line also carries Puig's signature suspicion of literary purity. His novels thrive on hybrid forms - melodrama, gossip, film dialogue, popular idioms - where tone is political. In that world, translating isn't about finding the "right" word so much as reconstructing a social atmosphere: who gets to sound educated, who sounds ridiculous, who is trying to pass. A translator who smooths everything into tasteful neutrality doesn't just lose style; they rewrite the power relations.
The blunt coda, "That's hard!", is doing more than sympathizing. It's an insistence that difficulty is the point. Translation becomes an act of authorship with moral stakes: you must recreate the pressure without imitating the surface. Puig implies a kind of fidelity that sounds paradoxical - less about equivalence, more about risk. If the original makes you uneasy, the translation should, too.
The line also carries Puig's signature suspicion of literary purity. His novels thrive on hybrid forms - melodrama, gossip, film dialogue, popular idioms - where tone is political. In that world, translating isn't about finding the "right" word so much as reconstructing a social atmosphere: who gets to sound educated, who sounds ridiculous, who is trying to pass. A translator who smooths everything into tasteful neutrality doesn't just lose style; they rewrite the power relations.
The blunt coda, "That's hard!", is doing more than sympathizing. It's an insistence that difficulty is the point. Translation becomes an act of authorship with moral stakes: you must recreate the pressure without imitating the surface. Puig implies a kind of fidelity that sounds paradoxical - less about equivalence, more about risk. If the original makes you uneasy, the translation should, too.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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