DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.

The Italians have a compact aphorism for the problem of translation: traduttore, traditore. Translator, Traitor in English. To translate is to betray. This gets at the fundamental problem of accessing texts in other languages (although T. S. Eliot supposedly said he could tell Dante was a great poet reading him in Italian, before Eliot could speak Italian himself). But translations can take other forms, like texts into the visual arts. Or into films.

Historians, inevitably, have a point of view. And it is right to be mildly suspicious of what that point of view is. But there are those scholars who seem (though how can we really know?) to be able to access the past on its own terms, to be able to operate almost like a native in that foreign land where “they do things differently”