“As I read the original work, I admire it. I am overwhelmed. I would like to have written it. Clearly, I am envious – envious enough to make it mine at all cost, at the cost of destroying it. Worse, I take pleasure in destroying the work exactly because it means making it mine. And I assuage what guilt I might feel by promising that I will make reparation – also, of course, by the knowledge that I do not actually touch the original within its own language.
The destruction is serious. Translating is not pouring wine from one bottle into another. Substance and form cannot be separated easily. (I hope we so not have to go again over the false dichotomy of les belles infidèles, which assumes one could be ‘faithful’ to a poem by renderling ugly or dull what it ‘says.’) Translating is more like wrenching a soul from its body and luring into a different one. It means killing. (…) There is no body ready to receive the bleeding soul. I have to make it, and with less freedom than in the case of the most formal poem on a given subject. I have to shape it with regard to this soul created by somebody else, by a different, though not alien, aesthetic personality.”
Rosmarie Waldrop: The Joy of the Demiurge, in: Dissonance (if you are interested). University of Alabama Press 2005.