Literary translation is one of those professions whose success is measured, (0) PARADOXICALLY, by its own invisibility. A translation that attention to itself has, in a certain sense, failed; the reader is meant to glide across the prose without being of the translator's mediating hand. And yet the choices made in the production of any serious translation are anything but mechanical. Every sentence presents a thicket of competing priorities — rhythm, register, connotation, cultural specificity — among which the translator must a defensible path. The work is further complicated by the fact that no two languages the same conceptual terrain in identical ways. What reads as gentle melancholy in one language can into maudlin self-pity when rendered too literally into another. This is why the craft has, in recent years, begun to attract the recognition that eluded it. Prize juries increasingly name translators on covers, and publishers have grown more willing to the distinctive voice of the translator as an artistic contribution in its own right. For those who have quietly practised the art for decades, such visibility is less a vindication than a long recognition of the obvious.