ABSTRACT
Valery Larbaud was ahead of his time as a writer to acknowledge the importance of translation, and to honor the translator’s work. “Amateur” is how he saw himself: Humble, he couldn’t think of comparing himself to the masters, and he saw his own work as very modest attempts in the art. It is himself who he describes when he portrays the translator as somebody who wants to please a friend. He also reminded that translation was a form of appropriation: “To translate a book that we’ve liked is to penetrate deeper in it than we could simply reading it, it’s to own it, and it’s somehow appropriating it.” For many occasional translators, the decision to translate is born of liking a book, of reading it many times over until the desire to share prompts them to get to work.
