Dear Miranda,
Thank you for your most recent message. It arrived, as you aptly described, “out of the blue,” a phrase that, by its very nature, resists translation. In my mother tongue, Spanish, one would say “de la nada” rather than “out of nowhere,” because the latter would be rendered as “de ningún lugar,” but out of nothingness. Nothingness is a term that unsettles me. It resembles nothing, yet it carries a philosophical twist. Whenever I encounter it, I think of Fernando Pessoa: “Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.” Rough English rendering from Portuguese might be: “I am nothing. I will never be anything. I could not want to be nothing. Besides that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.” Yet perhaps the opening line should be adjusted to read “I am nothingness,” given Pessoa’s meditation on insignificance.
But forgive the digression: your letter is far from trivial. Among many things, you ask me about the matter of “impersonating” renowned poets, those poems I circulated in class that were presented as works by Akhmatova, Celan, Drummond de Andrade, and Hikmet. You mention you still brood over them, despite the long passage of time.
You wonder why I compose verse from another voice’s perspective. Is it not deceitful? What if any of these “originals” becomes mistaken for genuine writing by the authors themselves? Are you “passing” as you read these pieces?
My answer may not soothe you. Or it could revolt you. Channeling another’s voice is precisely what translators do. Why not push the idea further and broaden the body of work of celebrated poets? In certain cases (Petrarch, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Borges, Amichai), I have devoted years to studying their idioms. Perhaps I am a kind of vampire, draining lifeblood to stay alive.
And do I possess fluency in every language I write in? Not entirely. I model my practice on writers who faced a comparable feat: Samuel Beckett translated Mexican poetry with remarkable success. He learned Spanish and French while a student at Trinity College, Dublin. Yet French held central importance for him (En attendant Godot began in French and was later self-translated into English), whereas Spanish remained largely absent from his life. Still, his renderings in An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, compiled by Octavio Paz, completed in 1950 but published in 1958, are stunning. UNESCO sponsored the project as part of a broader international cultural initiative, though Beckett reportedly found the work challenging.
Similarly, Richard Wilbur, renowned for his renderings of Molière and Racine, translated from Russian (Akhmatova and Brodsky), Spanish (Borges, Guillén), Italian (Dante, Quasimodo), and also from Portuguese, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Latin. Ursula K. LeGuin’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, despite LeGuin not knowing Chinese. And W. S. Merwin translated from Dahomey and Quechua. These are only a few instances.
Like myself, translators depend on an “insider” or another language in order to reach the original. Yet you’re right: I have pushed further: before or after completing my translations, I have crafted new originals. I have done this with the help of friends, colleagues, and, in some cases, with the aid of A.I.
Once I began writing, I realized I could also be an impostor. There is no shame in literary impostorship, only liberty.
Am I masquerading? Am I a charlatan? Yes, you’re right: my deepest influence—the paternal archetype I emulate—is Cervantes.
The fundamental questions behind this enterprise are fairly straightforward: Are these poems any good? And do they supply a fresh angle through which we can appreciate the original author?
You mention remembering the poems I offered after Mallarmé, Apollinaire, and Paul Valéry. That makes me glad. I relish the rhyming schemes of my Mallarmé and Valéry. (By the way, have you read Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin,” set in the cemetery of Sète, where Valéry himself rests? That haunting closing stanza lingers in memory:
Le vent se lève!…il faut tenter de vivre!
L’air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux réjouies
Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
I’m uncertain about syllable counting for the classical alexandrine (twelve “feet”) and for the “vers impair” described by Verlaine in L’art poétique. In my Mallarmé translations, some lines may be too short (eleven feet) or too long (thirteen feet), owing to the rules surrounding the e muet in classical French verse.
Anyway, here is another “fake original.” If you did not retain a copy of my previous version, tell me. I can send you a PDF:
“Sur la Tombe” de Stéphane Mallarmé
Sous ce marbre muet, où les songes sommeillent,
Le dernier souffle d’encre au soir s’émerveille.
Mille vers se tressant s’élancent, disparus,
Ne roulant plus leur or dans l’ombre des perdus.
Échos des mots—éclats de voix éteintes,
Labyrinthe du cœur, ses flammes étreintes.
Ici, dans la poussière, un reste se dépose,
Tandis que le Temps meurt, et lentement explose.
Sous cette pierre dort le songe tissé d’ombre,
Fin de la syllabe et de la pensée sombre.
Un frémissement plane au bord de son essor,
Un soupir s’éteint dans l’infini sans corps.
Quel monde reste-t-il quand tout se tait encore?
La plume est un océan où l’âme s’évapore.
Dans le vers vide on cherche un infini brisé,
Dernier souffle: cercueil, silence, vérité.
Ô lettres frémissantes en la main de la mort,
Vous partez—mais gardez le secret du sort.
La tombe est un miroir sans rumeur, sans mémoire,
Rendant l’écho muet du néant, du miroir.
Ainsi, dans la poussière, un feu pur se soulève,
Dans l’étreinte de mort, le dernier mot s’achève.
*
All to say that I remember you fondly from your student days. In class, you were bright and inquisitive, always contributing insightful remarks to our collective dialogue. Your passion for language was contagious. You often chose words not only to express your meaning but to serve as kernels of information in their own right. I especially recall a moment when, during a discussion about the difference between the house and home, you argued that the first is tangible while the second is imaginary. Imaginary—you clarified to the group that home is an artifice, a magical illusion, “por arte de magia.”
You might be surprised that that remark still resonates with me. I think of it often: home as a touch of magic. You were right.
It has taken me longer than expected to reply, because, first and foremost, it goes without saying that your request—to explain why I chose to become a translator in the first place, the hesitations I’ve encountered along the way, and “to offer guidance about translating in an age of bewilderment” where “everything seems to arrive at us in a rush”—deserves careful tuning. I spent many hours considering how best to craft a response. Honestly, my instinct at first was to overlook it: out of sight, out of mind. Why, in this storm of obligations, should one interrupt the current of events to explain how a subtle component of one’s upbringing —developed over time but without a clear explanation— became a central life theme?
Yet if we don’t pause to reflect on what matters, mortality will intrude unannounced, and when we confront the infinite, we may discover we overlooked the chance to streamline our thoughts and to weave a coherent narrative of ourselves along a single thread, to explain why we are the way we are.
*
You ask whether translation remains a worthy vocation, given your immense love for it and the reality that “the pay is meager.” I suspect this is less true than it once was. Yes, even though translators still aren’t always seen as performing intellectual labor (as you know, tenure committees are slow to acknowledge us), the field is shifting rapidly. More colleges now offer translation programs. In labor struggles, there are unions and associations that defend translators’ rights. There are prizes dedicated to translators, such as the National Book Award, ALTA, and others, and the Booker Prize for International Fiction now recognizes the best translated novel with an equal prize for author and translator. Along the way, media coverage of translation topics has increased.
At Restless Books, which specializes in contemporary world literature in translation, the translator’s name is prominently displayed on the cover. After acquiring a manuscript, aligning the author’s sensibility with that of the translator is, in my view, the editor’s most significant decision. We are not outliers, though it’s true that many large publishers still treat the translator’s role as secondary.
The other thread I was tracing while rereading Ovid’s Metamorphoses involved Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s forceful self-defense Response to Sor Filotea, written at the behest of her confessor. In it, she invokes the mythic figure Phaethon, son of the sun, who asks his father to grant him the chance to drive the chariot to the heavens. Ovid narrates Phaethon’s peril in the opening segments of Book One and the early portions of Book Two. In her bold challenge to the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church in colonial Mexico, Sor Juana identified with Phaethon’s audacity, aware that she might well perish on her path to intellectual illumination.
Then, by chance, I also opened a volume of Shakespeare’s poems and explored Venus and Adonis, which he published in 1593, prior to his major masterpieces. The volume itself draws on a portion of Metamorphosis, where the central theme is transformation: constant, inexorable, and often surprising transformation.
Sor Juana read Ovid in Latin, whereas Shakespeare read, borrowed from, and mined Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid, just as he drew on John Florio’s English rendering of Montaigne’s essays, from which he also lifted some passages, including sections of “Of the Cannibals” in his The Tempest.
Translators aren’t parrots, merely repeating a line in a new tongue. They are archaeologists of our verbal reservoir, discerning which words belong to which epoch.
Translation serves as a hinge through which writers from all corners of the world can connect. Shakespeare’s schooling remains something of a mystery. How could a Stratford-upon-Avon lad, who did not complete formal schooling, boast such breadth of knowledge in the classics, geography, philology, politics, and the human heart? The answer—rarely spoken in today’s climate of pluralism—is that schooling isn’t universal. Some are “autodidactas”—self-taught. The best education isn’t always a classroom. Yet wherever that education occurs—even amid the era of smartphones, tablets, and all manner of gadgets—it consistently requires encountering the written page.
And that written page often concerns foreignness—namely, translation. In her quiet room within the convent of San Jerónimo, Sor Juana maintained a personal library of roughly 4,000 volumes. They spanned Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and possibly Hebrew. In Response to Sor Filotea, she describes learning largely on her own, without regular instruction from a teacher.
I’m fond of Sor Juana’s interest in a form of Nahuatl verse known as tocotines. Nahuatl was the Aztec language, which the Spanish colonizers encountered upon their arrival in what is today Mexico in the 16th century. Nahuatl quickly became suppressed, even forbidden. Sor Juana kept a slave girl and employed an Indigenous young woman in her apartment, a maid who presumably spoke Nahuatl.
There has been commentary that the Nahuatl of Sor Juana’s tocotines is syntactically flawed. To me, that matters little; it still marks her drive to learn a tongue that, at the time and even now, isn’t considered refined. Her theological dispute with Father Antonio Vieira over the sutiliezas of Jesus Christ—the capacity of the divine figure to enact mercy—unfolded in bilingual fashion, Vieira being Portuguese by birth and Sor Juana raised in a Spanish-speaking milieu.
Today in the United States, learning a second language remains a privilege enjoyed by a relatively small segment of society. In a country of immigrants, the irony is stark: newcomers are urged to shed their mother tongue in favor of English. Yet many immigrants now recognize that abandoning their native language is unnecessary, provided they acquire English on their route to assimilation.
Returning to your remark about the modest compensation for translators: my sense is that investing in learning additional languages and committing to translation as a lifelong vocation remains a shrewd choice. You simply need to cultivate a multi-angled view of translation, which, in turn, opens up a wealth of possibilities.
*
You ask what sparked my decision to invent heteronyms. The answer is straightforward: I have always felt confined within a single self. Why shouldn’t we live more than one life? Since childhood I longed to step outside myself, to perceive the world from more than one stance. This may stem from my father, who was an actor by trade. I admired his ability to inhabit other people. It wasn’t just admiration but envy: a talent I coveted. I imagined it as a gift reserved for actors. Yet once I began writing, I realized I could also be an impostor. There is no shame in literary impostorship, only freedom.
The influence of my father’s acting extends further. You ask whether a pseudonym and a heteronym differ. They do. When I write under a pseudonym, I am still me concealing behind another name. The heteronyms, though, are far richer in their complexity: to write through them, you must become an actor—live vicariously inside another persona. My heteronyms are not clones of me. They speak languages I do not; they subscribe to political stances that diverge from mine; they might even dislike me personally. I don’t feel hurt. Why should I? They exist independently, autonomous and self-governing.
These heteronyms did not come all at once. Some have been in my life for years; others are more recent. Occasionally I discover a new one through an invitation from another that I have long dialogued with. In relation to them, you ask if I see myself as an orchestra conductor. Not at all. Each has its own voice, and I do not attempt to harmonize them into one coherent chorus. In fact, several of them can be more forceful than I am.
They are, indeed, a rambunctious bunch: opinionated, boisterous, and unpredictable. Do I prefer some of them to others? I don’t have favorites. Perhaps when one becomes a parent you might grasp this approach. What matters to me is their existence, how they came to be, and how their translations have evolved over their lifetimes. From them I continually glean new insights into translation theory.
Do they know one another? Yes, in some cases. A couple are even married. Others have met at conferences or at book launches. I know at least two have carried on a sustained electronic correspondence.
*
I was born in Mexico City into a cosmopolitan enclave. I am the child of Ashkenazi Jews. All four of my grandparents hailed from scattered parts of what was called the “Pale of Settlement,” the area in Eastern Europe and western Russia where the Russian czar permitted Jewish settlement, albeit under restrictive conditions. They emigrated across the Atlantic at the start of the twentieth century, each maternal or paternal line doing so for economic reasons and largely due to anti-Semitism. Their common language was Yiddish; collectively they also spoke Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German.
To my knowledge, Mexico became the final destination for two of them—perhaps three—yet those who dreamed of the United States rightly longed for entry there as well. Quotas thwarted that plan. Mexico thus became a second option. Yet within a few years the country revealed itself as a land of plenty, and within about a decade they had largely integrated as Mexicans.
I mention this because, although I grew up amid multiple languages, I do not remember noticing the multilingual texture of my world. As a child I shifted among tongues with ease, depending on who I was with or what I was discussing. Today we would call that code-switching. In my mind it felt natural that everyone did it. That is, until I learned that things were not so simple. On the street I found that non‑Jewish neighbors spoke only Spanish, which seemed more straightforward and efficient. Why then did my friends and I feel compelled to switch languages so as to communicate?
My love for translation springs from that Babel-like sentiment I felt as a child. To translate is to tailor communication to the needs of a given setting. I have always seen translation as inseparable from immigration. The Yiddish-speaking immigrants in Mexico were mastering Spanish, yet in Yiddish they could express themselves more purely, without the stiffness that sometimes accompanies newly learned syntax.
It wasn’t until I, too, became an immigrant—moving from Mexico City to Manhattan in the mid-1980s—that I fully appreciated the linguistic endowment my forebears had bestowed on me. I came to New York with the dream of writing, certain I could not fully explore that dream at home. Looking back at the young Ilan Stavans packing his bags, I feel affection and a bit of nostalgia. He was at once naïve and Quixotic. New York then was not only the epicenter of literary life but also a magnet for Latin American intellectuals, just as Paris had been for the “Boom” generation I deeply admired—García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes, and others. I could work as a reporter, a teacher, perhaps enroll in graduate study, as long as I allowed my literary ambitions to stretch their wings.
What that earlier version of me did not fully perceive was that my immigration required me to learn yet another tongue: English. When I arrived, forming a complete sentence often proved arduous. My vocabulary was sparse, and my pronunciation uncertain. I struggled with a number of sounds: the “aw” and “ao” in words like caws and chaos; the th- in thrifty; and the ph- in ephemeral. The early days in New York were tinged with embarrassment. I hesitated before speaking, afraid that my limited lexicon would betray me as inept or inflexible.
In large part, it was a period of self-judgment: I aimed to become a writer in English, even though I lacked the tools to assemble a compelling paragraph. How long would it take to feel fluent in English? Would the day come when people stopped fixating on what I could not express and instead focused on what I managed to pronounce, against all odds?
Immigrants learn to adapt. It is a give-and-take process that touches every strand of your being, but in the end you prevail. One day you stumble over a sentence and the next you become a chronicle of a novel way of perceiving life.
As you can see, I hold great awe for immigrants, not merely for what they accomplish but for their creativity. They defy hardship by inventing clever pathways. This is evident in daily life: juggling multiple jobs, launching enterprises, and imagining themselves anew with a refreshed identity. They take on two, three, or even four jobs to pay tuition. They borrow to start a business or open a shop, often because they have little to lose. Yes, immigrants, prior to arrival, have lost much. From then on, every opportunity is a gain.
I am in awe of the immigrant gift for acquiring a new language. I did it myself. Today I belong to the English-speaking ecosystem. I translate from it and into it. I can discern how English has transformed, choosing to translate not the contemporary slang of Manhattan but, if I wish, the English of Emily Dickinson’s late nineteenth-century New England, or the Shakespearean register, which, for many reasons, remains the most exquisite to me. I can also translate into the Colombian Spanish of García Márquez’s era, or the language of José Martí during the Spanish-American War of 1898, or the Spanish of Sor Juana’s Mexico around 1690.
Translators aren’t parrots, reciting lines in another language. They act as archaeologists of our linguistic reservoir, discerning which words belong to which epoch. Their mission is to render those words alive in a seamless flow. But translators, like immigrants, are also inventors of neologisms. Shakespeare alone coined roughly 1,700 new English words, including apostrophe, assassination, invulnerable, lapse, majestic, radiance, and suspicion.
It is translators who give us the chance to coexist with other cultures. But it comes with its share of difficulties.
Immigrants have replenished the English language in countless ways: Italians contributed fiasco, mafia, pizza, opera, and volcano. Yiddish bequeathed bagel, goy, chutzpah, and schlep. The same holds for Irish, Chinese, German, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, and more. In turn, translators are world-builders. Even the Bible’s King James Version, Jerome’s Vulgate, and other sacred texts enriched us with terms like female, childbearing, affliction, graven image, Shibboleth, Sodom and Gomorra, and, crucially, conscience, which owes its origin to I Corinthians 8:7 and II Corinthians 5:11.
Without translators, today’s English would be a mere skeleton, a hollow vessel deprived of its current grandeur. We owe these wordsmiths for having expanded it with sublime terms that shape our understanding of the world.
*
It was during a meeting with A. in New York City in the mid-1980s that I first realized my path was to be English. I’m thinking of a line by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish writer I have translated into both Spanish and English: “We must believe in free will. We have no other option.” Looking back on my twenties, I recognize that I chose English as my lifelong path, though I did not feel I had much of a choice. This isn’t entirely true, as I’ve described before: I had Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and I was studying French and Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion. Yet it does feel as if I had to choose English, that it was the language where my sense of freedom pointed me toward.
In On Borrowed Words, my memoir, I write about the obsessive, desperate need to master English. For me, it was the sole avenue toward a future. Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and other languages felt peripheral, while English stood at the world’s epicenter, the stage where the ongoing drama of the present was performed. I wished to be part of that drama. Being born in Mexico had given me countless tools to decode the world, but I knew the heart of the action lay elsewhere, up north. In Spanish, we lived through translation; in English, the originals were created. Looking back at that former self now, I feel nostalgia. Mexico today carries a living authenticity that America sometimes seems to have sacrificed. It grants itself the patience to savor history with genuine curiosity. Here, the past is a blend, not a fixed artifact with unambiguous meaning.
One of the many loves I discovered with A. involved naming. The way she uttered English—with meticulous care, as though every word mattered, as if it could unlock a universe—astonished me. I repeatedly asked her to pronounce a term again, to break it into syllables, to list synonyms and antonyms. That is how I fell for dictionaries: A. was an inexhaustible source of meanings and sounds, a living lexicon. She delighted in delving into etymologies, forging sonic links, letting words pair themselves in jazzy, improvisational ways.
With the little money I had, I bought a copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick. I had already tackled it in Spanish before leaving Mexico. The English was too daunting for me at first, but I read it a paragraph at a time, aided by a bilingual dictionary my father gave me as a birthday gift when he dropped me into a rented apartment on Broadway and 121st Street with three roommates. The words I didn’t know—there were plenty!—I would inscribe in a notebook. At the end of that study session, which went on late into the night, I would review every word, looking up its meaning, then close my eyes and rehearse it aloud, repeating the form and its sense until it stuck.
What I was doing, of course, wasn’t reading in the usual sense but forging a new self. The choice of a nineteenth-century novel rather than a recent one deepened my sense of being uprooted: by day, I lived amid New York’s Babel of languages, spoken with vigor by immigrants and visitors from every corner of the globe; by night, I felt transported to a voyage toward the great white whale, as though I had boarded a southbound ship to the Pacific. Every two weeks I would call my family in Mexico to describe my trials. They thought me mad. Why abandon the security of a comfortable life in Mexico City for the labyrinth of Manhattan and the knots of English grammar?
A. was my Virgil. Because we loved each other, everything she taught felt more like a summons to renewal than a lesson.
*
Even so, I never set out to become a translator. It’s one thing to begin an immigrant journey, another entirely to turn professional in translation. I dislike the word “professional”; it implies a mercenary stance toward the craft. Yet I recognize—no point denying it—that my work as a translator operates within an exchange. I pitch my translations to editors or publishers who either sign on or do not. If they do, we sign a contract with payment, a due date, and parameters such as length and intended readership.
My affection lies with translating poetry, fiction, essays—works for a readership that tends to be cultivated, even select. The number of people who read these literary forms remains relatively small. Despite our democratic, pluralistic dream of readers from all backgrounds exploring the Divine Comedy or savoring a poem by Anna Akhmatova or Paul Celan, the actual readership, statistically, is tiny.
But that is not the right way to look at it. In literature and the arts, influence is not measured by how many followers you have. It is the depth and complexity of those readers that matters. I align with the Talmudic teaching in Sanhedrin 37a:13, that sustaining even one soul equates to sustaining an entire world. Similarly, we should not measure a book by whether it has thirteen readers or thirteen million, as long as every reader finds something meaningful in the act of reading.
I don’t disdain literary achievement. Frankly, in translation, success eludes even the most popular titles. If luck smiles, you may strike a runaway hit. Yet even then, the publishing industry often denies translators the recognition they deserve, let alone a fair share of the credit.
Today, things are shifting. In decades past, the translator’s name might have appeared only in a small line on the copyright page. Now it graces the title page, and increasingly, the cover as well. Still, publishers still perceive the translator’s role as secondary, as if they were merely the vessel delivering content.
Another thread I found while rereading Ovid’s Metamorphosis concerned my work translating Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s pointed defense Response to Sor Filotea, written under her confessor’s direction. There she contemplates the Greek hero Phaethon, son of Helios, who begs his father to permit him to drive the sun’s chariot. Ovid narrates Phaethon’s peril in the late parts of Book One and early Book Two. In Sor Juana’s audacious challenge to the church’s authority in colonial Mexico, she identified with Phaethon’s daring, knowing that she might die on the road to intellectual illumination.
Then, by chance, I opened a volume of Shakespeare’s poetry and explored Venus and Adonis, which he published in 1593 before his later masterpieces. The volume itself draws on a segment of Metamorphosis, where the unifying theme is change: constant, inexhaustible, and often unforeseen.
Sor Juana read Ovid in Latin, whereas Shakespeare drew from Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation and from John Florio’s English adaptation of Montaigne’s essays, borrowing, among other things, portions of “Of the Cannibals” for his The Tempest.
Translators aren’t parrots, repeating a line in a new tongue. They are archaeologists of our verbal reservoirs, discerning which words belong to which era.
Translation serves as a conduit for writers worldwide to discover one another. Shakespeare’s education remains something of a mystery. How could a Stratford-born lad, with limited schooling, possess such breadth in the classics, geography, philology, politics, and the human heart? The answer—not often spoken in today’s climate of pluralism—is that formal schooling isn’t universal. Some are autodidactas—self-taught. The finest schooling is not necessarily in a classroom. Yet wherever it occurs, even amid the age of computers, iPhones, and tablets, the discovery of the written page remains essential.
That written page, in turn, often concerns foreignness—translation. Sor Juana’s private sanctuary in the convent of San Jerónimo housed about 4,000 volumes in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, and perhaps Hebrew. As she explains in Response to Sor Filotea, her education was largely self‑directed, with little assistance from teachers along the way.
I am drawn to Sor Juana’s fascination with a Nahuatl literary form known as tocotines. Nahuatl—once the language of the Aztec empire—became a repressed tongue after the arrival of the Spaniards. Sor Juana kept a slave girl and employed a nearby Indigenous helper who likely spoke Nahuatl.
It has been argued that Sor Juana’s Nahuatl in tocotines is syntactically imperfect. To me, that is of secondary importance; what matters is that it demonstrates her desire to master a language then considered less refined. Her theological debate with Father Vieira, regarding the subtleties of Jesus’s mercy, unfolded in a bilingual context, Vieira being Portuguese and Juana Spanish.
Today in the United States, learning a second language remains a privilege of the few. In a country built by immigration, the irony is inescapable, since newcomers are urged to abandon their mother tongue to adopt English. But many immigrants now recognize that abandoning their original language is unnecessary, provided they master English along the way.
To return to your remark about translators’ meager pay: my sense is that investing in learning a second, a third, and even a fourth language, and dedicating oneself to translation as a lifelong profession, remains a savvy choice. You simply need to be inventive, viewing translation from multiple angles, which in turn opens up innumerable possibilities.
*
You asked what motivated me to create heteronyms. The answer is simple: I have long felt imprisoned within a single self. Are we not allowed more than one life? Since childhood I have wished to step outside my own skin, to perceive the world through more than one vantage point. This impulse may trace back to my father, an actor by trade. I envied his ability to become other people. It wasn’t just envy; it was admiration, a gift I coveted as my own. I thought such a gift belonged to actors alone. Yet once I began writing, I realized I could also be an impostor. There is no shame in literary impostorship—only freedom.
The influence of my father’s acting extends further. You asked whether a pseudonym differs from a heteronym. Indeed they do. A pseudonym hides behind another name, while heteronyms require inhabiting another person’s voice, perhaps even adopting different languages and political views. They can dislike me as a person, and I do not take it personally. They are independent entities, autonomous and self-contained.
The heteronyms did not all appear at once. Some have existed for years; others are relatively new. Sometimes I discover a new one through a dialogue with an established one. Regarding whether I feel like an orchestra conductor, the answer is no. Each voice has its own timbre, and I do not orchestrate them into a single conversation. Some are even more assertive than I am.
They form a lively gang: opinionated, unruly, and unpredictable. Do I favor some above others? Not really. Perhaps when you become a parent you’ll understand this approach. I am more curious about their existence, how they came to be, and how their translations have evolved over time. They constantly teach me a new dimension of translation theory.
Do they know one another? Yes, in some cases. Two of them are even married. Others have met at conferences or at an author’s book launch. I know of at least two who have carried on long‑running email exchanges.
*
I was born in Mexico City into a cluster of immigrants. I am the child of Ashkenazi Jews. All four of my grandparents came from various districts within the old Pale of Settlement—an area in Eastern Europe and western Russia where the czar allowed Jewish communities to reside, but with many restrictions. They left around the early twentieth century, each following different paths, driven by dire economic conditions and, more often than not, by anti‑Semitism. Their common language was Yiddish, though they also spoke Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and German.
To the best of my knowledge, Mexico became the final destination for two of them, perhaps three. Yet even those three longed to reach America, where relatives had already settled. Quotas prevented that plan. Thus, Mexico became their second choice. Still, within a few years they discovered it could be a land of plenty, and within about a decade they officially embraced Mexican identity.
I tell you this because, despite my upbringing in a multilingual environment, I don’t recall ever noticing its breadth. As a child I switched between languages with ease, largely depending on company and topic. Today we would call that code-switching. In my mind it felt like the natural order of the world; I assumed everyone did it. That understanding, of course, was naive. As I grew, I realized it wasn’t universal. In the neighborhood, non‑Jewish kids spoke only Spanish, which felt simpler and more efficient. Why did I and my friends need to code-switch to communicate?
My affection for translation grows directly from those Babel-like emotions of youth. To translate is to tailor communication to the social horizon you inhabit. I have always connected translation intimately with the experience of immigration. The Yiddish-speaking newcomers in Mexico learned Spanish, yet in Yiddish they could express themselves in a purer, less impeded form. Depending on the language they used, I could at once sense how authentic their message was, how unencumbered by the rigid syntax of a newly learned tongue.
It wasn’t until I first became an immigrant myself, in the mid‑1980s, moving from Mexico City to Manhattan, that I learned to fully appreciate the verbal endowment my ancestors had passed down to me. I came to New York with the dream of becoming a writer, certain that I wouldn’t realize that dream fully if I stayed at home. As I look back at the younger Ilan Stavans who packed his bags, I feel a blend of affection and nostalgia. He was both naive and wildly idealistic. Back then, New York was not only the capital of the literary world but also a magnet for Latin American intellectuals, much like Paris had been for the “Boom” generation I so admired—Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, and others. I could work as a journalist, as a teacher, or even enroll in a graduate program, provided I allowed myself to test my literary ambitions.
What that earlier version of me did not fully grasp was that my immigration required me to acquire yet another language: English. When I arrived, composing a complete sentence felt extraordinarily difficult. My vocabulary was limited, and my pronunciation erratic. I struggled with sounds such as the “aw” and “ao” in words like caws and chaos; the “th” in thrifty; and the “ph” in ephemeral. Those early days in New York were marked by embarrassment. I was cautious about what I said, fearing that my vocabulary would betray me as clumsy or inflexible.
Mostly, it was a period in which I judged myself harshly. My objective was to become a writer in English, yet I did not possess the skills to assemble a compelling paragraph. How long would it take to feel natural in English? Would the day arrive when people would focus on what I could pronounce rather than what I could not say?
Immigrants learn to adapt. It is a giving-and-taking matter that touches every facet of your being, but in the end you succeed. You do not notice the transformation: one day you stumble, and the next you become a chronicler of a new perception of life.
As you can see, I cherish immense admiration for immigrants, not only because I am one of them but because of their ingenuity. They confront hardship with clever, practical responses. This is visible in everyday life—striking a balance at home, undertaking business ventures, and imagining themselves anew with a refreshed identity. They juggle two, three, or four jobs to cover tuition. They borrow to start a restaurant or a shop, largely because they have nothing to lose. Yes, immigrating means you have already endured substantial losses; after that, every gain is a bonus.
I am in awe of the immigrant talent for acquiring a new language. I did it myself. Today I inhabit an English-speaking milieu. I translate from English and into English. I can discern how the language has shifted, translating not only the modern Manhattan idiom but, if I choose, the English of Emily Dickinson’s nineteenth‑century New England, or the Shakespearean English, which for a variety of reasons remains the language I find most beautiful. I can also translate into García Márquez’s mid‑century Colombian Spanish, or into the Spanish of José Martí during the Spanish‑American War, or into Sor Juana’s Spanish of colonial Mexico around 1690.
Translators aren’t parrots, repeating lines in a different tongue. They are archaeologists of our linguistic storehouse, discerning which words belong to which era. Their task is to resurrect those words in a fluid, natural manner. Yet translators, just like immigrants, are also inventors of new terms. Shakespeare, for instance, introduced roughly 1,700 new English words—from apostrophe to assassination, invulnerable, lapse, majestic, radiance, and suspicion.
It is translators who grant us the chance to coexist with other cultures. But it does not come without its share of hurdles.
Immigrants have enriched the English language in countless ways: Italians gave us fiasco, mafia, pizza, opera, and volcano. Yiddish contributed bagel, goy, chutzpah, and schlep. The same pattern extends to Irish, Chinese, German, Vietnamese, Russian, Arabic, and beyond. Translators, likewise, are builders of worlds. To illustrate, we owe the King James Bible, Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and other sacred edicts for introducing terms such as female, childbearing, affliction, graven image, Shibboleth, Sodom and Gomorra, and, most crucially, conscience, which derives from I Corinthians 8:7 and II Corinthians 5:11.
Without translators, today’s English would be a mere skeleton, a hollow vessel devoid of its current vitality. We owe these translators for having enriched it with words that today frame our worldview.
*
It was during a meeting with A. in New York City in the mid-1980s that I first realized my destiny lay in English. I think of a line by Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Yiddish author I have translated into both Spanish and English: “We must believe in free will. We have no other choice.” When I review my twenties, I understand that I chose English as my lifelong vocation, even though I did not feel I could have refused. This is not entirely true, as I’ve already explained: I possessed Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and I had studied French and Ladino, the latter language of Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion. Yet it seems as if English was the path where my sense of freedom led me to walk.
In my memoir On Borrowed Words, I recount my obsessive, almost desperate need to master English. For me, it represented the sole route to a future. Yiddish, Spanish, Hebrew, and the rest felt peripheral, whereas English stood at the world’s center, the stage where the contemporary drama of the present unfolded. I wished to belong to that drama. Being born in Mexico had given me an abundance of tools to decipher the world, but I knew the action lay elsewhere, to the north. In Spanish, we lived through translation; in English, the originals were being created. Looking back at that version of myself, I feel nostalgia. Mexico today preserves a sense of authenticity that America occasionally seems to have sacrificed. It allows itself the time to savor history with sincere curiosity. Here, the past is a construct, with little fixed value and constantly reinvented.
One of the countless loves I uncovered with A. concerned naming. The manner in which she pronounced English, with astonishing care as if every word mattered, as if it could unlock a universe, astonished me. I often asked her to repeat a term, to syllabize it, to assemble lists of synonyms and antonyms. That is how I came to adore dictionaries. A. was a boundless reservoir of meanings and sounds, a living lexicon. She delighted in exploring etymologies, forging sound connections, letting words pair themselves in jazzy, improvisational fashion.
With my modest funds, I acquired a copy of Melville’s Moby-Dick. I had previously confronted it in Spanish before leaving Mexico. The English proved too intricate at first, but I read a paragraph at a time with the help of a bilingual dictionary my father gave me when he left me in a rented flat on Broadway and 121st Street with three roommates. The unfamiliar words—there were many—went into a notebook. By night’s end I would review every term, look up its meaning, close my eyes, and recite each word along with its definition until it became mine.
What I was doing, of course, wasn’t merely reading; I was constructing a new identity. Choosing a nineteenth‑century novel rather than a more contemporary one reinforced my sense of displacement: by day, I inhabited New York’s multilingual milieu, where immigrants and travelers spoke with vigor; by night, I imagined a voyage southward toward the great white whale. Every fortnight I would phone my family in Mexico to narrate my trials. They thought I’d lost my mind. Why abandon a comfortable middle-class life in Mexico City for the labyrinth of Manhattan and the labyrinth of English grammar?
A. was my Virgil. Because we were in love, every lesson she imparted felt like an invitation to renew myself.
*
Yet I never planned to become a translator. It is one thing to embark on an immigrant journey, another to become a professional translator. I don’t like the term professional; it suggests a mercenary approach to the craft. Yet I recognize—and it would be foolish to deny—that my work as a translator is part of a transactional agreement. I pitch translations to editors or publishers, who may agree or reject. If they accept, we forge a contract that specifies payment, due dates, length, readership, and other particulars.
My love lies in translating poetry, fiction, and essays for a discerning audience—readers who are enthusiasts. The number of people who purchase these kinds of literary works remains small. In spite of the democratic, pluralistic ideal we cherish—readers from all backgrounds savoring the Divine Comedy or a poem by Anna Akhmatova or Paul Celan—the statistical reality is modest.
Nevertheless, that is not the right frame. In literature and the arts, impact isn’t measured by the size of one’s following. It is the quality of those readers—their depth and complexity—that matters. I agree with the Talmudic maxim in Sanhedrin 37a:13 that sustaining even a single soul equates to sustaining an entire world. Likewise, we should not measure a book by whether it has thirteen readers or thirteen million, so long as each reader finds reward in the act of reading.
I’m not dismissing literary achievement. Honestly, in translation, success remains elusive even for bestsellers. If you’re lucky, you may strike a runaway hit. Yet even then, because of unfair publishing practices, translators rarely receive deserved acknowledgment, much less fair compensation.
Today, however, change is underway. In decades past, a translator’s name might appear only in a small line on the copyright page. Now it often appears on the title page and, increasingly, on the cover itself. Still, publishers tend to treat the translator as a mere conveyor of content. Their sensitivity, their choices, and their endurance often go unrecognized. You have heard this complaint before, and you should hear it again. Translators’ rights are human rights.
Each modern language has been built upon the labor of numerous skilled translators. Where would English readers be without pioneers like John Florio, Constance Gardner, and Robert Alter? Dozens of poets have served as translators themselves: Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, Pablo Neruda, Emma Lazarus, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Joseph Brodsky, Octavio Paz, Marilyn Hacker, Seamus Heaney, and others.
My conviction is that we inhabit a golden age of translation, akin to the great cross‑cultural exchanges of the Middle Ages in places like Toledo and Constantinople. The volume of new translations today is staggering. This reflects an insatiable appetite for literature in other tongues, even as some powerful nations push for monolingualism. New novels, memoirs, histories, and other genres are translated at remarkable speed. Globalism fosters a shared reading experience across borders. It is a phenomenon of synchronicity.
Yet that moment of synchronicity—the instant when a reader in Ghana, Japan, or Pakistan and a reader in New York all hold the same text in their hands—is a cause for celebration. It allows us to dream of being contemporaries, not merely sharing a distant parallel existence forced by colonial hierarchies that once divided First, Second, and Third Worlds with exclusive demands.
It is translators who enable us to coexist with other cultures. But it does not come without challenges. The selection of material to translate and the distribution of books remain obstacles to this simultaneity.
*
I have spoken at length. I did not intend to steal your time. I hope these reflections prove helpful. I’m not sure I answered your questions as fully as you hoped. Everything we do is shaped by the circumstances we inhabit. My concise answer to your inquiry: it is through translation, with all its labyrinthine routes, that we discover our true value. Align your choices with your peace of mind, and, without hesitation, commit to translation as a lifelong pursuit. You will emerge stronger for it.
I await further dialogue between us.
With affection, I
—Translation as Home: A Multilingual Life, by Ilan Stavans, edited by Regina Galasso (University of Toronto Press, 2024).
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From Fictional Translations by Ilan Stavans. Copyright © 2026. Available from LSU Press.
