Discovering this phenomenon of “translation-hopping” (also known as indirect translation) firmly established my fascination with translated literature, not only as a reader, but also as someone who is fascinated by the politics of publishing. On the one hand, indirect translations can be used to fill a gap in the market, and—for practical or financial reasons—it is sometimes easier, especially for smaller languages like Swedish, to find English-to-Swedish translators than translators that work from another small language, like Korean. According to the Swedish publisher, when Kang’s English translations blew up in the United Kingdom, the Korean-to-Swedish translators would have needed eighteen months to complete the The Vegetarian, and a further few months for Human Acts—which, in the already slow world of publishing, would have set publication back two to three years—whereas an English-to-Swedish translation would ensure that Swedish readers could have access to Kang’s writing while the Booker win was still on everyone’s mind. In this way, re-translations can offer smaller-language markets a chance to keep up with trends, and help to contribute to a more diverse literary landscape.
We tend to think that they are different things, the tears we shed yesterday or the tea steaming in our cups today or the water of the Thames or the Tigris or the Ganges… But the same droplets continue to travel beyond borders of time and geography, connecting our stories and silences.
I live on a mountain and am surrounded by mountains and last year I planted five rosebushes. Last year I dug five holes and it took a few days because the ground is hard where I live and it is full of bluestone and other rocks. In the old days they made use of the rocks that they found when they were digging into the ground. They built walls of bluestone to keep the cattle from going past the property line and you can still see many of these walls today and there are even some of these walls on my own property. These days the rocks are not useful to me at all and they were a big nuisance to my digging. Once the bushes were in the ground, four out of the five bushes from last year bloomed once or twice, and they had some nice flowers but it was nothing too spectacular. The blooms were small and the flowers were plagued by bugs and beetles and slugs. The beetles were the worst of the pests in the way that they crawled and in the way that they chewed on the petals. The blooms barely smelled like anything at all. The bush all the way to the right never bloomed and its leaves stayed small like fingernails. The lack of frequent blooms made every bloom feel like a gift. Now these bushes are more established and it is their second year. With another year come more established roots and with more established roots come more frequent and beautiful blooms. All of the rose experts and all of the expert rose gardeners agree on this.
The metaphor of the mirror, which gives this book its title and defining analogy, is designed to show that AI remains miles away from being anything like real human intelligence. By attending to that gap, between reality and reflection, we can find essential clues about what makes us human. Shannon Vallor, a professor in the ethics of data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, invites us to consider the image that appears in the bathroom mirror every morning: