if you could break into some of my assumptions and perceptions of what translation is versus how it actually looks in the world and maybe even some of the the more interesting i don't know you mentioned gunter grass and you mentioned murakami having translators coming together at the same time so i'm just fascinated to learn more about this sort of collaborative aspect of translation that seems like such a singular activity or even a duo at the most

Yeah, I mean, we could say the same thing about writers groups and writers workshops, including like informal writers workshops that turn what would otherwise be a pretty solitary, even more solitary than translation, because in translation, you're automatically in conversation with at least one other person who's written the text.

But I think there are situations that lend themselves to translator-to-translator collaboration.

And Olga is so generous with her translators.

It has been important to her to get them together.

And she actually, since winning the Nobel Prize, has organized... and funded her own translator summits, not really any more to talk about her work, but to invite her translators to come together just to be in community and to think about Polish literature kind of more broadly with some talks by literary critics and other authors and so forth, which I think is just such an amazing and magical thing to do.

in her home in the country.

But Can you tell us about the language you're translating to and from and also writing and how you came to those languages and what it's like to work between very different ones?