On Being Translated

It is worth saying something about the condition of the writer who finds himself being translated.  Being translated is not work for either the weekday or the weekend...it abounds in violent and conflicting emotions.  The author who finds before him a page of his own work translated into a language that he understands will, variously or all at once, feel that he has been flattered, betrayed, ennobled, X-rayed, castrated, planed smooth, raped, embellished, or murdered.  Rarely does he remain indifferent toward the translator, whether his is an acquaintance or a stranger, who has jammed his nose and his fingers into his viscera: he would gladly send him, variously, or all at once, his own heart carefully packaged, a check, a laurel wreath, or his seconds for a duel.

        - Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades (1985)

Happiness

Have you sometimes thought, dear sweet friend, how many tears the horrible word “happiness” is responsible for?  If that word didn’t exist we would sleep more serenely and live in greater peace.

    - Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Alfred LePoittevin, 

         June 17, 1845

The Values of the Enlightenment

I believe that one of the few things that stands between us and an accelerated descent into darkness is the set of values inherited from the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.  This is not a fashionable view at this moment, when the Enlightenment can be dismissed as anything from superficial and intellectually naive to a conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism.  It may or may not be all that, but it is also the only foundation for all the aspirations to build societies fit for all human beings to live in anywhere on the Earth, and for the assertion and defense of their human rights as persons.  In any case, the progress of civility which took place from the eighteenth century until the early twentieth was achieved overwhelmingly or entirely under the influence of the Enlightenment, by governments of what are still called, for the benefit of history students, “enlightened absolutists”, by revolutionaries and reformers, liberals, socialists and communists, all of whom belonged to the same intellectual family.  It was not achieved by its critics.

                - Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide” (1994)