I've never had the impulse for someone else to translate me into my own language. My impulse has always been to translate someone else into mine.

I have a deep love for the art of translation, and I couldn't find a novel that captured the fascinating, reckless adventure of it as I'd experienced it, or portrayed translators as the passionate risk-takers that so many of the translators I know are. So I wrote the book I couldn't find.

I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.

A single conversation can change things.

Humor is serious work. But it keeps everybody at the table.

It's the best motivation to have a particular beloved reader in mind! Because you feel this urgency that you really want somebody you care about to be able to experience a sentence the way you experienced it in another language.

It would be great if I woke up tomorrow and could speak Persian. Wouldn't you love to wake and have a language in your mind that wasn't there the night before?