Why the First, Best Lesson I Learned about Translation Was a Healthy Fear I was a poor, scrawny white kid with crooked teeth who grew up in the barren hills of central Arizona. The year before my birth, the Soviets launched Sputnik, shocking the world, and causing a frantic U.S. Congress to allocate funding for fast-track training of the next generation in science and the Russian language. These were dollars that flowed downhill and into the deserts and chaparral country and back woods to us public school kids who played in dirt schoolyards and chased lizards and lived in makeshift trailer parks carved awkwardly into the hills. Just a few short years later, I found myself working as an intern, holed up in a tiny library with sunshine pouring through ornate windows in the Smithsonian Castle building on the…