“Translating is creating, and conversely creating is translating. Since 1971, Albert Bensoussan has been the French language translator of Mario Vargas Llosa (The city and the dogs, Aunt Julia and the scribe, The party at the goat), Nobel Prize for Literature 2010 and French academician. After fifty years playing the “surrogate mother” of the Spanish-Peruvian novelist and having transformed himself into “the talkative shadow of the great scribe”, having translated fifty of his books as well as hundreds of texts, this former professor of Hispanic literature offers us, with Mario Vargas Llosa, world writer, a fascinating and very personal essay on this long and faithful work of translation. It also offers a beautiful synthesis of the life and work of the writer, “a river of words, a torrent of writing, a storm under a skull”, writes Bensoussan about Vargas Llosa, a disciple of Flaubert and Hugo who handles the intimate as well as the political. A story of friendship and literature.
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