Philip Roth doesn’t exactly love having his books put in a foreign tongue. Things just aren’t the same, it seems, when a young Portnoy is doing what he does to a piece of Leber.

In his recent Man Booker International Prize acceptance speech, the 78-year-old eminence of American letters took a dig at the process of reworking his words for a foreign audience, saying: “One of the particular pleasures I’ve enjoyed as a writer is to have my work read internationally, despite all the heartaches of translation that entails.”

Well, it’s not as if he’s the only author ever to point out the shortcomings of literary translation.

Umberto Eco has called translation “the art of failure.” Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has said that translation is like a woman. “If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.”

At the same time, however, some translators say the process deserves more recognition, and some literary festivals are taking note, with the Toronto-based International Festival of Authors highlighting the art of translation this fall.

“The timing is good for this. Right now there’s a surge of interest [in foreign books],” says Geoffrey Taylor, director of the IFOA. The mania for Swedish writer Stieg Larsson, for example, may be a focal point for how a work goes from its native tongue to English, Mr. Taylor adds.

The event at the festival will likely see authors and translators discussing what is a “very complex” process that few readers entirely understand, Mr. Taylor says.

Translators spend very little time, if any at all, in the limelight.

“You can be blamed for things, but you’re very rarely given credit. Nobody knows what you’re doing. Nobody even knows that you exist,” says Jo-Anne Elder, president of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada.

Indeed, rarely will a translator’s name appear on the cover of a book, a point of contention for many in the field. Read more.

See: The Globe and Mail