Translation teaches a number of virtues. Modesty: anyone who has ever translated a sentence by Flaubert, for example, will never be tempted to boast of his or her own prose. Selflessness: the very act of translation effaces the translator in favor of the writer translated. And thriftiness, of course: considering what a translator is paid for long hours of selfless modesty.

But translation can also teach us how to teach. To suggest to a student of literature the multiplicity of meanings latent in a text, the interdependence of the elements of a story, the constellation of decisions that constitutes a poem, what model of reading better instructs than the process of trnaslation? What other interpretive act so thoroughly comprehends a piece of literature that its expression is, in fact, a reconstruction of the original text? Where else does reading result not in mere criticism but in creation? And which other teacher, in illuminating the enduring and universal genius of literature, takes as its goal the formation not of a pedant but of a poet?

John Biguenet is the co-author of The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, both published by The University of Chicago Press. He edited Foreign Fictions, a collection of international short fiction. From 1979 to 1994 he was the editor of the New Orleans Review.

John Biguenet is Professor of English at Loyola University, New Orleans.