The novelist has great sympathy for those taking her work abroad, perhaps because her own life has provided similar problems to decode

As it was the WG Sebald lecture, Margaret Atwood told her audience at the British Library, she was entitled to make it as freeform as Sebald’s writing, full of “peripatetic” wanderings, mixing up memoir with other genres, and just plain “odd”.

Though this was a warning not to expect a linear argument, let alone a theory of translation, her beguiling autobiographical digressions in Atwood in Translationland were not there just for fun. They illustrated that “we spend much of our childhood translating”; that it’s a universal activity, not one confined to professional translators. Atwood recalled a childhood divided between Ottawa (where her parents listened to bemusing BBC radio broadcasts) and a cabin in Quebec, where the local language was French and she would try to decode the writing on cereal packets. More.

See: The Guardian

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