Using Words Instead of Walls

Refugee bans, Brexit and border walls. With isolationism on the rise these days, cultural understanding can be a powerful antidote to an us-against-them ethos. And literary translation is a crucial vehicle to create that understanding. Converting text from one language to another sounds simple, but literary translation takes prose and poetry from impossibly far away and gives it relevance and significance in our own lives. It provides access to unknown cultures, misunderstood political climates and foreign belief systems. It is through such careful translation that barriers break down, cultures meet, and we understand each other’s humanity across distance and history.