🌐The Greats

Crossing the Taklamakan on the outward journey, Xuanzang dropped his water bag and went days without drinking, nearly dying before his horse found a spring. Sixteen years later, the same emperor whose ban he had broken welcomed him back to Chang'an as a national hero, funded his translation institute, and pressed him — unsuccessfully — to quit the monkhood and serve as a minister. Nine centuries on, his journey became the novel Journey to the West, recasting the translator as legend.

The caliph al-Mutawakkil, testing his new physician, ordered Hunayn to concoct a poison for an enemy, offering riches and then imprisoning him for about a year when he refused. Brought back and threatened with death, Hunayn still refused, answering that his religion and his profession both forbade harm. The caliph, satisfied, made him his personal physician — the biographer Ibn Abi Usaybi'a preserved the story, along with the legend that translations were paid for with their weight in gold.

The Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, resolved to buy up Tyndale's smuggled New Testaments and burn them at St Paul's Cross. According to Edward Hall's chronicle, the merchant Augustine Packington brokered the deal — while secretly acting for Tyndale, whose debts the bishop's money paid and whose corrected second edition it financed. "The bishop had the books, Packington had the thanks, and Tyndale had the money." Freshly funded, the new edition poured into England faster than the first.

At Cholula in 1519, by Bernal Díaz's account, a local noblewoman — assuming the Spaniards were doomed — urged Malinche to save herself and marry her son, letting slip details of a planned ambush. Malinche drew the plan out of her and reported it to Cortés, who struck first; the massacre that followed remains one of the conquest's darkest and most debated episodes. Nahua accounts began calling Cortés himself "Malinche" — the interpreter's name swallowing the general's.

D. H. Lawrence remembered watching her in her garden, working through Dostoevsky: she would finish a sheet, toss it onto a pile growing almost to her knees, and start the next without looking up. The speed was real — as were its costs: she worked her eyesight nearly to blindness, and later critics like Joseph Brodsky complained that English readers could not tell Tolstoy from Dostoevsky because both arrived speaking Garnett. She had visited Russia in 1894, sledging between famine-relief stations, and met Tolstoy himself.

His Tianyanlun did not just translate Darwinism — it named it. Yan Fu's renderings of "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" became slogans of a desperate reform generation; the young Lu Xun recalled devouring the book as a student, and Hu Shih — later the father of vernacular Chinese literature — took his very name, Shih, "the fit," from Yan Fu's phrase for survival of the fittest. Few translators anywhere have watched their word choices become people's names.

Rabassa translated One Hundred Years of Solitude without reading the novel first, working straight through as he read — arguing later, in his memoir If This Be Treason, that any text is being read for the first time when you translate its first sentence anyway. Asked once whether his Spanish was good enough for García Márquez, he gave the profession its favorite retort: the real question was whether his English was good enough.