If you think of something, do it. Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.

The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.

Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

When I'm trying a new form- trying to do something I'm not used to doing, which was true of the novel.