I once wrote the best translation of Anna Karenina and no I do not know Russian, but I did not need to know Russian in order to produce the translation. I had never even read Anna Karenina, but without reading it and without even so much as opening up the book, I intuited not only the entire plot but also the subplots and the character development and the greater themes of love, war, loneliness and class struggle. All I had to do in order to absorb Anna Karenina was to hold the book close to my heart. It wasn’t even a book itself, but rather a large stack of printed paragraphs in Russian. Maybe it was not Russian, maybe it was a large stack of printed out wing-dings. None of this mattered. I looked at the printed stack of papers and was overcome with the knowledge that I was the one who was destined to produce the next English translation of Anna Karenina and that this would be my life’s greatest goal.
It was very good timing, too, because I feared I would never write again. I was aging rapidly, my jowls were arriving with gusto and my neck had new creases. But then, the stack of wing-dings arrived and I knew it was my time. The decision to translate was less of a decision than a psychic compulsion. Papers clutched to my heart, I understood my only duty was to simply surrender and to allow my body to be the vessel of this great new translation. I was at home in a legacy of translators, and what relief I felt, knowing that I was aligned with a niche and important crowd of cultural workers, intellectuals, lovers of literature.