My translation course is inevitably the source of new insight. It is as though any problem relevant to my own intellectual pursuits can be approached via translation. Whether the students feel the same way is another matter entirely.

Borges has an essay on the "Superstitious ethics of the reader" (approximate title). The idea is that, by dint of repetition, a particular literary passage might come to seem inevitable "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..." "Longtemps, je me suis couché à bonne heure." "Of man's first disobedience...." But the original author would not necessarily have thought of this language as sacred or immutable. For Cervantes (says Borges) the opening of the Quixote was nothing special. Borges's approach to translation, then, involves a questioning of the idea, found in theorists from Benjamin to Steiner, that the original is a sacred text.

The OuLiPo approach, exemplified by Harry Mathews, sees translation as a game with particular rule or constraints. Why translate with an artificial constraint, the prohibition of the letter "e"? The point is to become aware of the less visible constraints that govern translation.