The Writer–Translator Equation | by Tim Parks | The New York Review of Books

In recent months, I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test this writer-translator equation.

I'm writing a novel. It began to present itself as a possibility perhaps a year before I started work on it. Two vague ideas that had been bumping around for a while came together and took on a little form. One: an older man, once prominent in cultural circles, has withdrawn from all contact with his peers and stopped following news or media in any form; he lives as a kind of urban hermit, an acute observer but, as it were, uninformed. Two: someone receives, out of the blue, an invitation to attend the funeral, in a foreign country, of an extremely distinguished colleague, friend, and rival of many years ago.