A book that's going on my list

I waited too long, and now you have to pay for the LA Times link, but I am totally excited about reading this book. (Not as excited about what a big nerd that makes me.)

Before I wanted to be a historian, I was really into translation. Learning language made me realize what an artistic - and important! - task it is. Doomed to failure in some respects, open to all sorts of possibilities in others. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The book is If This Be Treason, a memoir by prolific translator Gregory Rabassa. Reviewer Michael Henry Heim, on Rabassa's "commitment to ... cultural mediation as represented by translation:"

Much as he argues against the notion of translation as a betrayal of the original - and he does so with great gusto - he is also perfectly willing to concede the point: In the end, what matters is not so much that a work comes through the translation process unscathed as that it enriches the culture it enters. Even if translation is treason to the original, he argues, we should make the most of it."