There is a violence in undoing someone’s words and reconstituting them in a vocabulary foreign to them, a vocabulary of your own choosing. There is a violence, too, in the way you are—for long moments—annihilated by the other; undone in return. Neither the translator nor the text emerges from the act unscathed.
This quote resonated so much with me because i believe that it is so true and i know this because my grandmother used to translate texts in the past as well and she would always talk to me about her struggles while doing so. She always felt like her translation from one language to the other would never do justice to the words of the original author.