Every act of translation begins in (0) DEFEAT. No sentence, rendered, arrives in its new language unaltered: connotations are shed, rhythms redistributed, and the precise quality of strangeness that gave the original its voice is either domesticated into familiarity or into a different strangeness altogether. The translator must therefore choose, at each turn, which losses she will — and in doing so becomes, willy-nilly, a kind of ghost-author, composing in the spaces the original has vacated. This is not a to be lamented but the very condition of the craft. The best translators are those who acknowledge the impossibility of their task and proceed regardless, neither pretending to a transparency they cannot achieve nor indulging in the self-congratulatory visibility that some contemporary schools. They operate instead under a discipline of principled approximation, aware that what they produce is a new text in conversation with the old one rather than a substitute for it. To read translated literature is to develop an ear for these ghostly presences, and to find in their interplay a pleasure that monolingual reading cannot supply.