Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1941

no reading will have the same meaning as the original

Oh of course, that goes without saying. You could even take it a step further and state – dons sunglasses – that there is no original either. :)

I mean, most things I read and literally everything I write have, at their core, the impossibility of true communication with any other. We do our best with the tools at our disposal, translation included.

xpost lol, YES.

Silly crit theory jokes aside, yeah, that's spot on, and Blanchot himself obviously agreed (see his essay on Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator', reprinted in Friendship). If anything, it's a hang-up of mine since I've done a fair amount of translation over the years and it's always a tremendously frustrating experience that requires you to own up to your inevitable failure (then again, when is that ever not true? Beckett knew a thing or two about this, incidentally).