The Philosophy of Translation (Yale UP, 2024) is a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Damion Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people’s names, rhymes, rhythm, “untranslatable” cultural nuances. In this book, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading—but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.
In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Damion Searls to discuss The Philosophy of Translation, exploring what it truly means to read as a translator, how grammar shapes worldview, and where creativity lives in the space between languages.
Damion Searls studied philosophy at Harvard and is a prominent translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, including books by Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Rilke, Proust, Kielland, Jelinek, Schwitters, Mann, Modiano, and Fosse. His own books include the novel Analog Days, the poetry volume The Mariner’s Mirror, and The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator.
Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.
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