Ursula K. Le Guin is fascinated not just by language, but by languages. As well as poet, critic, and author of fiction for adults and children, Le Guin is a translator. Although it is only in recent years that Le Guin's translations have been published in book form, her interest in translation is long-standing; she began a doctorate in French and Italian Renaissance poetry, and has published English translations of a number of foreign-language poems. In recent years, Le Guin has published four books which can be classified as works of translation: her own version of the Tao Te Ching, translations of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral and of Angelica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial, and a collaborative work with Diana Bellessi. I refer to these texts as Le Guin's translations although they are not necessarily translations in the traditional sense of the word. She refers to her version of the Tao Te Ching, for example, as a "rendition, not a translation," as it was created by collating existing translations (Tao Te Ching 107). Nonetheless, in all of these works Le Guin renders texts from one language into another. Le Guin's fascination with translation, however, does not end with translating the words of others. Many of her protagonists are translator-figures, and she consistently depicts multilingual worlds. Translation is also a recurring metaphor in both her fiction and critical work, yet it is one that has received relatively little critical attention. I argue that Le Guin's translations--both in the sense of her translated texts and her use of translation as a metaphor within her work--demonstrate a rejection of what Sukanta Chaudhuri terms unilingualism: "a mindset or ethos that operates only in terms of one language" (73).
