I found my voice as a writer, ironically, by speaking in other people’s voices, which is to say when I started translating in earnest. Before about five years ago, I’d dabbled in translation. In college, I once got out of taking a final exam in an Italian class by turning in a translation of the brief memoir “Winter in Abruzzo” by Natalia Ginzburg, and later it was the first translation I ever published. Still in college, I started translating Camus’s The Stranger to teach myself French. Living in Japan years later, I collaborated with my friend Mark Caprio to translate the Japanese novel A Heart of Winter by Miura Ayako, which we did manage to finish and publish, and also some contemporary Japanese Buddhist poetry. I should have given in to my fate long ago, but I spent many years writing short stories, personal essays, even a travel column for a while, before I committed to translation wholeheartedly.
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