We live, as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard predicted two decades ago, in the Age of Simulacrum. To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To pretend is to simulate to have what one does not have. I wonder what will distinguish the literary translator in the Age of Simulacrum. To continue his research and evade mediocrity? Or perhaps no one knows what distinguishes or highlights such excellence anymore. It is, in truth, a bleak diagnosis.
Books are born from the most diverse circumstances and for the most diverse reasons; but behind them always lies an element that acts as a fulcrum, and it is none other than the reading of other books, of other texts. A translated book is the child of its own circumstances and is sustained by its own reasons: those of the translator and his readings. Therefore, of his own ideas.
A master of oddities and creator of imaginary lives, Thomas Mann told us that the ideas of great thinkers are humanity’s heritage, for the only thing they really possessed were their oddities. Taking this thought as a starting point, I would like us to join rarity and creativity to the role of the literary translator as an irreplaceable promoter of creative oddities.
Literary translation is like the bridge one crosses without looking too closely at its beams: if the pace is steady, the reader advances and forgets for a moment that underfoot there are two shores, two notes for a music, two ways of ordering the world. The literary translator conveys not only words but also temperatures, silences, ironies, breaths; the translator decides when a sentence should retain the dust of its original language or when it should open a window into the target language.
We could then link translation essentially with the theory of communication. For more or less fifteen years, the more information we receive, or the more immediate access we have to it, the more repetitive and indiscriminate it becomes, and the more we specify and enjoy its reiteration. However, literary translation is the opposite of reiterating haste, the opposite of the rapid agglutination of information. Translating a book, a text, a verse, unlike this new world of dizzying blue sheep, remains a creative activity carried out alone and never repeating its steps. For Ricoeur, the translator’s task moves not from word to sentence, to text, to cultural whole, but the other way around: from the cultural whole to the text, to the sentence, to the word.
In his book Sueñan los traductores con ovejas eléctricas / « Do Translators Dream of Electric Sheep », Professor José Francisco Ruiz Casanova warns us that the world increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick’s futuristic fantasy, in which real beings and their versions converge, like a destitute Babel of five continents and seven seas that bustles below and speaks desperately. An idea as bleak as it is fatal, that of a lingua franca for a wandering and frenetic anti-culture. On the one hand, we have the dream of a single language; on the other, as Ricoeur puts it, the search for the unity of the idea and the translator’s codes; and it is that third text, of a unique character, that certifies the legitimacy of the translation.
In the face of so much wonder and danger, one cannot help but remember Nietzsche’s warning about the need for certain illusions to make life bearable and beautiful without forgetting that is all they are, or we can become trapped by our own creations.
In its beginnings, AI was like another Big Bang. A great event in the civilized world. The greatest, perhaps, or the most spectacular today, so it also tends to be a tremendous generator of intersecting sensations. However, let’s not forget that it is the total result of our brain. Of our creative capacity.
It would not be wise to think that, in the battle between AI and its generator, the human brain, there will be only one winner or loser. Perhaps the reasonable thing would have been to expect that the two could feed off each other, but without ceasing to distinguish one another. I think we are past that now. And in the fact that many people do not seem to see clearly the limits of AI compared to what is authentically created by the human brain (not to mention those who already place its virtues above those of the brain), lies one of the greatest dangers of AI, for which, obviously, AI is not responsible. Those of us who work in literature and literary translation have, in that order, an enormous commitment to culture: to avoid intellectual insincerity.
To make matters worse, this commitment is aggravated (and thus even more unavoidable) by the fact that literature has become increasingly abundant in recent times. However, the brain’s direct work responds to predictable formulas, such as those used by AI. To see this, look at a considerable part of today’s literary production (not just the best-sellers), in which plots, structures, and archetypes are repeated ad nauseam. However, they fill the commercial circuits of the book market, suggesting they are the books the public buys most. Sometimes it seems that all these books, whatever they are about and whatever country they come from, were written by a single person. So, between such books, created by the human brain, even before the emergence and rise of AI, and AI itself, there are hardly any differences. In both cases, information is provided, along with guidelines on how to write.
So, will the literary translator survive with their two hands, their perspective, their readings, their head, and their worktable? I have to say, it has been so since the times of Livy Andronicus, Han Shigao, and St. Jerome: its province, its own territory, and its authentic signs of identity. But writers and translators must not be satisfied with its survival. It must preserve its essence and prestige without the slightest shadow of doubt or suspicion. This task commits us. To face it, we must start by assuming that AI is another product of the human brain, a tool created by our ability to think, create and collaborate. Let us not follow narratives that divert our attention from the real problem: the total manipulation of our legitimate right to think, the full exercise of our creative capacity, and the preservation of what unites us and, at the same time, distinguishes us: our cultural heritages. Let us think about our work as artists, and let us seek transparency laws that governments recognize and implement, so that our work is remunerated and copyright is respected. Creators, translators, artists, let us see intellectual insincerity as a harmful practice; let us see these journeys, existential and real, as a stimulus for artistic and creative dignity. For natural resources such as water, used excessively in every AI installation, for every unpaid literary translator, and for every human being on the planet, let us seek the dignity of creative sincerity. Therein lies the literary translator’s irreplaceability.
As I write these words for this panel, I think about the difference between dignity and price. A young man asks the philosopher Enric F. Gel whether, if he had to negotiate with an extraterrestrial, he would send a philosopher. Enric F. Gel replies that he would choose Immanuel Kant because he is probably the philosopher who has reflected the most on the dignity of the person in the entire history of philosophy. He goes on to explain that, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that life exists on other planets; in fact, he built his entire ethics on the idea that it could apply to beings from other planets. Why? Because Kant distinguished between what he called dignity and price: price has comparative value; what has exchangeable value can be exchanged for something else of equal worth; things with a price are replaceable, interchangeable, substitutable. But then he said people have a unique kind of value, for when we think about putting a price on a person, all the alarms go off. So, there is another type of value: priceless dignity; it is infinite. The person has value in that it is irreplaceable and unique. That is, each person. You don’t put a number, you don’t put a price on them, and they have a special value. Kant argued that people must be treated as ends in themselves, that is, as something with value in itself that must be respected, not as a means to achieve other ends. This is instrumentalizing people, and this is one of the worst crimes that can be committed. Therefore, Kant is trying to convince extraterrestrials. We are going to try to understand ourselves in such a way that we treat ourselves as ends in themselves and not only as means to conquer, control, displace, exploit, etc.
In Canada, organizations such as the Canadian Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE) advocate with the government and other associations for transparency and copyright in all expressions of art and culture. The Literary Translators Association of Canada is a member of this coalition, and we have recently sent a letter requesting transparency and respect for literary translators’ rights.
Let us remember that artificial intelligence has entered this profession as one more tool on the table: it can speed up searches and reveal patterns that once required a monk’s patience; but it does not, on its own, know what to do with an ambiguity that must remain ambiguous, nor with voluntary clumsiness, nor with that slight deviation that turns a correct sentence into a living one. In other words, it cannot create the rarities that define us. Perhaps the present of translation does not consist in choosing between the human hand and the machine, but in calmly recognizing which part of the work belongs to calculation and which to deep reading, to responsible doubt, to the ear that listens not only to what the text says but also to what the artist’s hand is still trying to say under the irreplaceable glow of creativity.
©Lidice Megla
Nanaimo, Vancouver Island. September 26, 2026.
Written for the Literary Translation Panel. FILibro Canada, 2026. St. Paul University.