In this week’s magazine, Adam Gopnik writes about translation, and about whether some things are simply “untranslatable.” On the Out Loud podcast, he joins Ann Goldstein, a New Yorker editor and an acclaimed translator of Italian, to discuss translation with Sasha Weiss, the literary editor of The New Yorker’s Web site. Gopnik and Goldstein ask whether it’s more important to translate accurately or to capture the spirit of an original text, how speaking and writing in another language change us, and the reasons for the persistent belief that the subtleties of language often get lost in translation. “It’s your group identity that’s being asserted by insisting on the primacy of the language,” Gopnik says. “We are citizens of our language. We don’t just sort of speak them instrumentally; we inhabit them.”
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