India, Jan. 30 -- In The Politics of Translation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that "the task of the translator is to surrender herself to the linguistic rhetoricity of the original text". She asks the translator to think beyond the logic of a text and consider the space it occupies within a given political milieu. This demands 'preparation' and 'patience' from the translator in their engagement with the text, she adds. Cecile Wajsbrot's novel Nevermore, originally published in French in 2021 and translated into English by Tess Lewis in 2024, recalls Spivak's words.

An unnamed translator has escaped the lure of her home city Paris and has arrived in Dresden to translate Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. The translator i...