IN her recent book Why Translation Matters, Edith Grossman remarks that “translation asserts the possibility of a coherent, unified experience of literature in the world’s multiplicity of languages”.

An acclaimed translator of Cervantes, she makes the point that the development of the modern novel in Europe “grew directly out of the model of Don Quixote, which was translated almost immediately after publication”.

Yet the art of translation, she argues, seems to be taken for granted.

Poignantly, she asks: “What is the point of translating works of literature when we already have a huge surfeit of books in our own language and a diminishing number of readers?”

The answer, of course, is to draw people out of their cultural shells. She cites the hilarious bumper sticker popular with American campaigners against English/Spanish bilingualism: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

Reading Jose Saramago’s Cain, one is reminded of Grossman’s argument at multiple points. Saramago, the son of landless Portuguese peasants, a poet, playwright and novelist who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, was a self-styled “libertarian communist” who delighted in writing works of acid satire and mordant literary revisions of historical events.

His subversive take on the New Testament, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), was removed from the short list of the European Literary Prize on the grounds that it was offensive to the Catholic Church. Saramago left Portugal in protest. When Saramago died in June last year Harold Bloom declared that his books, which have sold two million copies in Portugal and been translated into 25 languages, should be a considered a permanent part of the Western canon.  Read more.