Translation: "the truest form of reading"

What attracts you to the craft of translation?
I love reading, and I think translating is the truest form of reading. People are always asking me if I write my 'own' work. I find it hard to convey to them that I feel no need to write — I would much rather 'be' a lot of different authors by translating them.

Charlotte Mandell answers questions about her craft at Emprise, a literary journal, and also includes unpublished translations of poems by Jean-Paul Auxeméry. Maybe this particular answer explains why I have no qualms about reading translations: it's a form of reading in which one is not reading alone.

Later, Charlotte reveals that she has just translated an extract from Mathias Énard's Zone, a novel that, according to Sophie Lewis writing at RSB, many people in France are calling "the novel of the decade".

Of course, Charlotte has provided two highlights of the four years of this blog (I missed last week's anniversary!): translations of Jean-Luc Nancy's tribute to Maurice Blanchot and Emilie Colombani's review of the recent release of the same author's early essays.