On episode 184 of The Quarantine Tapes, guest host Naveen Kishore is joined by Tess Lewis. Tess is a translator and she and Naveen dig into how she has experienced translation during this time of quarantine. Tess explains how she sees translation as an act of intimacy and a responsible, responsive act.
Naveen and Tess touch on the recent controversy around the Dutch translation of Amanda Gorman’s work and discuss the politics and ethics of translation. They talk about the incredible diversity that exists within languages and how translation can work to give smaller languages their due. Tess ends the episode by reading from two of the writers whose work she has translated, Philippe Jaccottet and Maja Haderlap.