The Philosophy of Translation
Yale University Press, 2024
“Translators are priceless, and their task is often thankless. Now more than ever, readers who have been confused by Google Translate do not understand the project of translation. The Philosophy of Translation makes clear the mission of the translator, the amazing task of offering an extant work by constructing a new work. This book is open, honest and, most of all, smart; it makes clear that the act of translation is an act of creation. Remarkable.”
— Percival Everett
“Damion Searls is one of the most erudite and original—and provocative—thinkers on one of today’s most important cultural subjects: translation. This book is vast, generous, charming, and profound, a brilliant meditation on how we read and what it means to move in and out of languages and language.”— Jennifer Croft
“Searls’s philosophy is ultimately one of freedom—to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done.”— Max Norman, The New Yorker
“This book is phenomenal… the most complete, forward-thinking, handy, rich, gleefully nitty-gritty, and compelling book on translation that I have ever read.”— Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books
“The Philosophy of Translation reminds you that a gifted translator must be a gifted writer as well: to translate is, first and foremost, to write. His voice on the page is sometimes pettish and sometimes exuberant, but it’s never less than engaging... enlivened by his love of wordplay and a flair for the epigrammatic…. Searls is especially riveting when he walks us through the choices he has made as a translator: this is OK, this is better, this kind of nails it.” — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Review of Books
“From a rich and unexpected array of sources ranging from Mayan etymology to the psychology of airplane pilots, Searls weaves a compelling case for translation as a creative act of individual human perception.”— Esther Allen
“It’s no easy task to explain what translators do all day. Damion Searls’s lively book explains the conceptual and practical challenges in terms that will be accessible for non-specialists and invigorating for translators and theorists.”
— Emily Wilson
“Damion Searls is perhaps the only translator in the world who could write a book with the title The Philosophy of Translation and be taken seriously by theorists and practitioners of translation alike. This erudite and accessible volume takes us on a tour of the world of translation where the familiar is made unfamiliar and back again. A stellar work I will be quoting from and returning to for years to come.” — Anton Hur