Writing as an Act of Translation

I just wanted to share this apt quote from an Op-Ed article by Michael Cunningham in the New York Times, which my mother recently passed along to me. This bit of writerly wisdom really struck me:

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write. It's one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it's transcendent, it's brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it's never the book that you'd hoped to write. It's smaller than the book you'd hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.

Click here to read the rest of the article, which is about translation of literature in both the specific and the broad sense. What about you? Do you feel like the written product is an inadequate approximation of what's in your head, or do you generally feel pretty good about what you write? Does the realization get closer to the vision as a writer matures and gains more experience, or is it a perennial struggle?

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