WHETHER writing a novel in English or reading it, the quality both of the writer’s work and the reader’s understanding will depend first of all on their having read the major English authors and secondly, and more importantly, on how closely each, though especially the novelist, has read Miguel de Cervantes, Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac and Marcel Proust. From that essential base of foreign-language writers, the novelist will then need to listen to a wide range of voices — choosing such dissimilar stylists as Wolfgang Goethe, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Mikhail Lermentov, Gustave Flaubert. Émile Zola, Machado de Assis, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Giovanni Verga — to discover the aesthetic preference most suited to produce the “voice” that will be heard as his or her particular style.

One’s originality of style is the gift of a natural evolution based on experiments combining various established styles that one is attracted to, and therefore the larger the source from which to extract those potential combinations, the greater the likelihood of arriving at an original style.

Similarly, one attempting to write poetry in English will need to have studied with great care not only the major English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to the present but also the European poets from Homer to modern times. As with the novelists, the majority of the original works to be read were written in foreign languages — Greek, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian— of which most people manage to acquire no more than one or two.

In short, the modern English-language writer depends on translated versions of some of the most important works in order to find his or her own voice. And herein lies the problem. The translations have to be good and have to be available. A writer who knows no Spanish, as happened with me when I first tried to read Don Quixote, has no way of knowing when reading it in translation if he’s clearly hearing the voice of Cervantes or a hoarse whisper from a sick person in the next room. My first attempt, in 1973, to read Don Quixote was the translation by Samuel Putnam, then widely read at American universities. I found it so stilted as to be unreadable and wondered what had created Cervantes’s reputation as the father of the modern European novel.

Then, in 1986 an American publisher reissued the translation done by Tobias Smollett in 1755, with an excellent introduction by Carlos Fuentes, which had me entirely enchanted and convinced me that Cervantes was indeed the originator of the modern novel, and more. His vast narrative, which is considered the perfection of the picaresque form, has within its large labyrinthine structure many bifurcations of formal experiments which anticipate many styles that we associate with 20th-century writers, from magical realism to the idea of the anti-novel. If you think you have a bright new idea or have hit upon a new way of saying it, look again at Quixote: Most likely, Cervantes has been there, done that. Produced over 250 years ago, Smollett’s translation is so brilliant that one forgets that one is reading a translation of a novel written 150 years earlier.

Incidentally, the introduction by Fuentes, defining the nature of the modern novel and its sharing with philosophy the three themes identified by Fuentes as “the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly”, is a masterpiece of critical writing and provides the reader a valuable general context for appreciating the novelist’s design before one plunges into Smollett’s marvellous translation which brings Cervantes vividly to life.

Smollett was himself one of the supreme writers of English prose and his rendering of Quixote demonstrates that often a translation is best when it is done by a writer who is himself a proven master in his own language. Because he has a special genius for creating in his own language, there is a lasting freshness to his prose.

Similarly in poetry, while there are many translations of Homer and Virgil, the 18th-century versions by John Dryden and Alexander Pope are still the most delightful to read. A related consideration is that with many key works, like the Odyssey, translations done by language scholars often begin to sound anachronistic after a few decades, and each generation is obliged to produce an up-to-date version in recognisably contemporary speech — and that, by its very nature of being contemporary, has a built-in obsolescence which will make it anachronistic until the very phrases which were praised for being on the mark will be considered silly. But translators like Smollett, who are more attuned to the music of language and the aesthetic appropriateness of style, never sound old-fashioned.

As English readers, we are fortunate that some major English writers have translated important foreign works. A contemporary example is the poet Christopher Middleton whose translations — the poems of Goethe and Friedrich Hölderlin, the letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, the novels and short stories of Gert Hofmann and Robert Walser — have enriched our appreciation of German literature. And it was another distinguished British poet, Edwin Muir, who with his wife first brought us the work of Kafka. Twentieth-Century German Poetry (edited by Michael Hofmann), The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (edited by Paul Auster), the latter with translations exclusively by British and American poets, and The New Italian Poetry (editor and translator Lawrence R. Smith) and each a beautiful bilingual edition, offer a comprehensive insight into some of the important modern European poetry that would widen the literary perspective of any English poet or reader.

When arrested by a fine thought in a bilingual edition of poetry one looks curiously at the original on the facing page, guessing which of the poet’s words held us momentarily breathless in the translation, and tries to read aloud the line and enjoys the fleeting pretence of hearing the music of a language one does not know. As when opening the Inferno and reading the first lines, “Midway in the journey of our life…”, we look at the opposite page and declaim, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…”, and impressed that we are reciting, however awkwardly, the original, repeat the passage aloud several times, convinced that we are deep into Dante’s Italian.

Sometimes the original wording of the thought that impresses us so touches our imagination it releases a body of ideas that become the nucleus of a new work that we had not previously imagined. I experienced this when reading Pablo Neruda’s poems. In one, the line, “en esta historia de martirios”, which didn’t require much knowledge of Spanish to understand, had me so enthralled that I stared at the words until a rapidly flowing montage of images, some recollected from past experience of travelling in the New World and some asserting themselves from mythological texts of the Old World, the two colliding in a disturbing mirror reflection, so filled my mind that Neruda’s line echoed obsessively in my brain as “a history of torments” and I went on to use that invasion of fused images to write a novel called A New History of Torments.

Soon after I’d begun writing it, a line in another Neruda poem, “la luz sellada, el laberinto muerto”, suggested just the right titles, ‘The sealed light’ and ‘The dead labyrinth’, for the two parts of the novel in which the action, and especially the imagery, came to be symbolically driven by those two phrases. Now, the fact that a work is thus suggested by one’s reading does not, of course, privilege it in any way, and what one ends up writing could well be rubbish, for the quality of a work is always a reflection of its execution and not its source. We know, for example, what gave Joseph Conrad the idea for Lord Jim, but our admiration of that novel is quite independent of our knowledge of the reading background that inspired it. The only relevant point is that one should give oneself the chance for that moment of inspiration to strike.

In the 1960s, many American poets worked on translation. The early success of Robert Lowell’s Imitations and his version of Jean Racine’s Phèdre and W.S. Merwin’s El Cid seemed to set a trend, and before the decade was out many other poets attempted to get a piece of the action until with some it began to look like a mechanical exercise. Some poets produced translations of poems from a language they did not know but only had a literal version with which to work. In Ghazals of Ghalib (edited by Aijaz Ahmad), several poets, including Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Mark Strand, the leading younger poets of that time, were invited to translate from literal versions of Ghalib’s ghazals: the best one can say about the result is that it is interesting but there is not the remotest hint of Ghalib’s voice in any of the translations.

However, there were sufficient serious translators in the 1960s for there to be an outpouring of European literature, especially from countries behind the Iron Curtain. The US and Western Europe took almost a gleeful pleasure in promoting the work of writers like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who were suppressed by the Russians and created a new interest in East European poetry that brought us such excellent poets as Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz from Poland, and Vasko Popa from Yugoslavia. Another voice that astonished English readers came from the Hungarian Ferenc Juhász, translated beautifully by David Wevill.

The richness of translated work available in English was heightened by the publishers eager to exploit the new market for writers considered significant in their native countries — Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Francis Ponge from France, Yehuda Amichai from Israel, Shuntaro Tanikawa from Japan and Eugenio Montale from Italy, to name some who are still important to read today. Penguin Books launched its Modern European Series, other established publishers like Jonathan Cape created a separate division that concentrated on translations, and several new publishers featured translated literature as their most important offerings.

Such was the interest for translated literature in the 1960s that the University of Texas established a translation centre and funded it generously to attract major writers to spend time at the university working on new translations. At the same time, philanthropic foundations in America gave generous grants to university presses to publish literature in translation. This coincided with the so-called Latin American boom. The University of Texas Press was thus enabled to launch its Pan American Series and publish some of the notable Latin American writers, including some of the best work of Jorge Luis Borges and Machado de Assis. Other university presses, especially Princeton with its Bollingen series that brought us Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Valéry, made central contributions to the dissemination of world literature that continues to be crucially relevant today.

North Point Press, a new publisher in San Francisco, distinguished itself by championing the great 20th-century German novelist, Hermann Broch, who had been all but forgotten. It was a courageous risk to take: for by 1983, when North Point published Broch’s important novel, The Death of Virgil, English-language readers were less interested in high culture and the market for serious literature had begun to collapse. In this new reality, for a publisher to invest in translations became a forbidden luxury. North Point stopped publishing new books in 1991.

By that date, the established mainstream publishers had abandoned new literature in translation unless the original had already been a popular success in its own language, usually novels that contained “important” subject matter — as if the novelist was an investigative journalist with a story set in one of the current disasters like war or a nuclear meltdown, which gave readers the illusion that the book was serious and instructive. New poetry was out of the question. Even if you were the distinguished Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who had received the Nobel Prize, no major publisher wanted an English translation of your work, and had he not been brought out some years earlier by Bloodaxe Books, a small publisher in provincial England, he would remain entirely neglected for all his native renown and, indeed, importance in European poetry. Also by the 1980s, university presses, facing reduced funding, all but abandoned literature; with economic justification the sole criterion, it was safer for them to publish books on butterflies.

The great influx of translated literature that had imbued the work of a generation of English writers with a cross-cultural fertility was at an end. But perhaps interest in translation among English readers had merely hit the pause button while the newly kindled technology was adjusting humanity to new ways of enriching the imagination. The generation coming of age at the beginning of the 21st century grew up with its head bent and eyes fixed on their smartphone screen. No doubt among them must be some who, surfing the internet, will hit upon some enthusiast’s website raving about a new foreign writer and will spread the word in a viral frenzy, and perhaps in the not-so-distant future, with e-books gaining popularity and social media substituting book reviews to disseminate information about what’s new, there will be a renewed interest in translation.

For the present, however, readers and writers seem to have lapsed into neglectful somnolence — in their ignorance, readers swallow the literary equivalent of fast food while being deluded by promotional publicity that they are enjoying a gourmet dinner; and the writers, not troubling themselves with important foreign works, remain complacently unaware that their approach is like playing tennis with a squash racket: with luck they sometimes hit the ball over the net but rarely reach any depth, and have no idea that their performance is entirely bereft of power and style.

ZULFIKAR GHOSE is a poet, novelist and literary critic. Apart from criticism and poetry, he has also penned many novels, including the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian. He is professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.