Margaret Jull Costa

A mention in today's Guardian Review led me to this interview with the woman who's made so much brilliant literature available to English speakers. I think her translations of Saramago are wonderful, in that she creates a wholly believable stream of language, unlike anything anyone else has ever written in English. I love her comment that one of her pleasures is when

a sentence suddenly clicks into place, or when I find the perfect solution to a pun or a proverb (Saramago is full of them). There is, above all, the pleasure of working so closely with a text that it almost becomes mine and of working almost inside the mind of an author whose work I love.

I'd never spot those puns and proverbs, and it's good to have someone trustworthy to pick them up.