The first time I lived in Mexico City, I came, as I have always come, to be with Atenea, the woman I love, and stayed for 8 months, from April to December, and really I would have been content to stay longer, except that the woman I love was leaving and wanted me to come with her. It’s good to move for love, to have love and passion for a person — although love for an idea or a place will do in a pinch — rearrange your sense of space and time. When we told Arturo, Atenea’s father and my future father in law that we would fly out around mid December, his brow furrowed. He was not upset that his daughter was off on another adventure elsewhere in the world. That he had grown accustomed to. But he was perturbed that I would spend all this time in Mexico City and not be around for December 12th, and see the long procession of pilgrims up to the basilica of The Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe.

Frankly, I didn’t and don’t understand the fuss on his part. My father in law, always mysterious, no matter how much Spanish I learn, insisted that I would want to see the crowds, the splendor of the Basilica. I said I had been to the Vatican and seen catholic splendor, and as for the fervent crowd, I had been in Jerusalem for Yom Kippur at the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, and seen religious devotion en masse. He kept pushing. Eventually, I asked why it was so important to him, wasn’t he an atheist? “Sí,” he replied, “pero soy un ateo Guadalupano!” “Yes, but I am an atheist adherent of the Virgin!”

It’s a peculiar punchline to one of my favorite anecdotes about the oddness of Arturo, Mexican religious attitudes, the role of the Virgin in the national imagination. It has a coda too. When we moved to Mexico City for the foreseeable future last winter, Atenea texted the family group chat that she would come with our son on December 15th, and I’d arrive 3 days earlier, with some big suitcases. She asked if I could have a ride to our apartment. The family balked. “En día de Lupita?” Her sister scoffed. “The traffic from the pilgrims will be murder.” Atenea and I had completely forgotten that my ticket was for the day of the procession Arturo had been so adamant I see. “What can I say?” I laughed, “Soy un judío Guadalupano!” “I’m a Jew of the Virgin!”

Given my cheerful willingness to hobnob with saints like this, perhaps it’s not so odd that I am spending this International Day of Translation thinking about Saint Jerome, the reason for the season. If you are unaware, International Day of Translation is on September 30th to coincide with the feast day (and death anniversary) of Jerome of Stridon, who was responsible for the Hebrew to Latin translation of the Old Testament, which of course I grew up calling the Tanakh or simply the Torah. He also translated into Latin the Greek scriptures of the New Testament which I grew up calling goyishe narishkeit, gentile nonsense. Together, this Latin edition of the Christian scriptures is called the Vulgate, and while it is not quite as mythical as the Septuagint, the supposedly seventy translator miraculous translation of the Torah into Greek, its legacy in the Roman Catholic Church and around the world is such that it nabbed Jerome his role of patron saint of all translators. So I am thinking on my art, and its history, the thorn in the paw of the lion. What to say of translation, that nasty sharp pointed question, “but what do you mean?” In the soft foot of that noble beast, Literature?

It is grand and beautiful and fatally easy to speak of translation in broad and glowing terms. It is as old as the fall of Babel, which is to say it is as old as the failure of language to unite humanity, as old as the failure of language, as old as failure; translation is as old as two people not understanding each other and a third, who is somehow between them, trying to get them on the same page. It is older than pages. It is as old as in between.

Of course trying to describe translation is an act of translation, an attempt, as is all language, to feel less lonely in the sensation of finding the right word for some other word. Oh bother, that is not what I meant. That is not what I mean. But of course it is, it all is, you only have my words for it, my word for it. And that’s translation too, to trust your fellow human being, their life and experience with both languages, with language itself.

Translation is betrayal, goes the old proverb, we are always letting someone down, either the original or no that’s it we just are always doing the original dirty. The original, the original. And if it went away? If there were only my words, alone, in your voice? Well that would just be dying, wouldn’t it? That is, someone else always tells our story, if we’re lucky, and it’s not about us at all. It’s a thorny question.

In Judaism we have no sainted translators. Onkelos, who translated the Torah into good workaday Aramaic for the Jews of the late ancient world, is considered a vital source for slightly arid, philological attempts at exegesis and preaching, but I’ve never heard his virtues particularly exalted. While Solomon Blumgarten, better known as the poet Yehoash, whose translation of the Tanakh into Yiddish was a crowning achievement of his career, is considered a king of poets, it’s hard to imagine an editor of Der Tog smiling benevolently from Heaven, or venerating his tomb in the Bronx. So I am left with Jerome to pick the thorn from my paw, scowling all the while at my Yiddishe kepelakh, my itsy bitsy Jewish head.