Works such as Homer s Iliad or the Bhagavad Gita , Ovid s Metamorphoses or Kafka s Metamorphosis , Flaubert s Madame Bovary or Melville s Moby Dick . The purist may insist that we ought to read in the original languages, but we know that such an ideal is impractical.
Literature is to be read.
Translate we must in order to endow the reader with the power to make some form of contact with much of the world s great writing. I had heard of a New York publishing house which publishes literary works by Belgian authors for a series on Belgian literature, so I sent the editor a proposal which was accepted. In March 1998, I had the opportunity to interview Madame Rolin at her apartment in Paris. In spite of the differences in our ages, Dominique Rolin was eighty-four years old at the time, we got along like two best friends who had not seen each other in a while. My translation, titled The Garden of Delights , is now completed and came out in July 1998, published by Peter Lang.