Which comes first – writing or translation, the chicken of the original text or the egg of translation?¹ I wondered while I was writing this piece. The answer seems obvious; you can’t translate something that doesn’t exist, that’s not yet written – although I have often wished this were possible. My translators and I have joked about this, with me telling them: «you go ahead and translate, I’ll write it afterwards.»

But now I am starting to think that things are not so obvious. Actually, every writer is in and of themselves also a translator. They translate, carry over, dress up in words that which they take from inside themselves or from the world, from what has been experienced, thought, read. Writing is transformation and translation of the visible and the invisible, from which the author creates their works. Or translation of the invisible into the visible.

It is no coincidence that the etymology of the word «translation» (from the Latin translates) means to carry from one place to another, to transfer. In this sense, writers, translators and smugglers are all actually doing one and the same thing – translating, that is, carrying across, transferring that which is desired, valuable, missing, suppressed, forbidden.

Allow me to tell a story about the first thing I ever wrote, even though a more precise wording would be the first thing I ever «wrote down» on a blank sheet of paper. When I was six or seven, I had a nightmare, which – as if that wasn’t bad enough – recurred every single night. The more scared I got about having the dream again, the more frequently it occurred. One morning I got up my courage to tell it to my grandmother, whom I was living with at the time. But as soon as I started, she stopped me, pressing a finger to her lips. Scary dreams should not be retold, because it makes them come true. Actually, she put it much more beautifully: they fill with blood and come to life.

So I was left alone with my nightmare, unable to tell it to anyone, yet also lacking the strength to hold it in. So then I came up with the, to my mind, brilliant idea – we can only be brilliant at six or seven – of writing down my dream. I secretly tore a page out of my grandpa’s notebook and using the freshly learned letters of the alphabet, in a rather ugly scrawl, I wrote out my dream. And… a miracle occurred. I never had that nightmare again. But I also never forgot it. That was the price. (I still remember it today, fifty years later, I can tell it to you, if you’d like to know.)

But getting back to our topic, what had I actually done? I transferred the nightmare I had had, I pulled it out of the zone of dreams and brought it out into the light. I carried it out of the darkness, translated it out of the depths of the night, onto a blank sheet of paper. And as we all know, scary things don’t look as scary in broad daylight. So let me say it again – the origin of writing lies precisely in such a translation from one world (in this case that of a dream or of the invisible) into another, visible world. Please allow me to indulge in this analogy as well. Unlike Charon, who ferries souls across the river Lethe in his boat into the kingdom of the dead, writing ferries or transfers the souls of the dead in the opposite direction, into the living kingdom of readers. In any case, we must admit that every writer is secretly a translator.