The textual history behind a given work might rank low among all the cultural and linguistic differences existing between languages and literary cultures. Let's say we can make a complete list of all of these factors.
These are just two examples of the kinds of challenges that confront translators while they work on making foreign literature accessible to new audiences. True, the mere mention of lead-off men, bunts, and ground-rule doubles would already have broken that spell, but footnote opponents feel that since, by and large, today's fiction writers don't use them in their stories and books, footnotes are an unwelcome intrusion in literary translations. But nothing breaks the spell of reading like the intrusion of a footnote. Did their unfamiliarity with baseball compromise their ability to appreciate the books as a whole? A few footnotes might have gone a long way in squelching their doubts. I recently spent several hours trying to explain baseball to authors Peter Weber (Switzerland) and Jan Böttcher (Germany), who were utterly baffled by references to baseball in Don DeLillo's Underworld and Phillip Roth's American Pastoral. Sometimes readers will be unfamiliar with the culture in which the text originated. English readers of these same sentences who find themselves wondering when the period will show up-oops: the spell is broken. Readers from German-speaking countries are said to be more tolerant of long, sometimes page-length sentences. Tastes in style differ between literary cultures.
Sensitive translators know that there are any number of things that can sever the connection between the reader and the translation. In English, more often than not, this means producing a text that will not threaten to break the spell of reading.
Literary translators strive to make their texts count as literature in the language they are translating into.
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