AustLit

'The great Spanish novelist Javier Marías includes a scene in A Heart So White (1992) where a translator deliberately mistranslates a conversation between two characters who obviously stand in for Margaret Thatcher and Felipe González. He does this to send a coded message to the other translator in the room, his future wife. It is an extraordinary set piece, a serio-comic exposé of the translator’s power but also of its limits. An individual, Marías seems to say, can manipulate communication between authoritarian states for private gain, but ultimately can’t safeguard against that authority.' (Introduction)