Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Translation, Labour and Who Owns the Loom

 

Alberto Manguel’s The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation is a cultivated, erudite and often moving defence of literary translation. Published by Carcanet Press on 24 September 2026, the book is described by the publisher as a book-length essay on the translator’s craft and on translation as what Manguel considers the “keenest form of reading”. The volume also contains his own illustrations. Yet the book's fascination lies not only in what it says about translation, but also in the questions its conception of culture leaves unanswered. Its strengths and limitations belong to a recognisable liberal-humanist tradition in which literature appears primarily as a conversation conducted across centuries between writers, books and exceptionally attentive readers. What recedes from view is the material world that makes this conversation possible: publishers, markets, property, censorship, wages and, above all, labour.

The title itself provides a way to develop a more materialist conception. Carcanet Press explains that the reverse side of the tapestry is the definition of translation Manguel takes from Don Quixote. The metaphor is extraordinarily suggestive. Look at a tapestry from the front, and the picture appears finished and coherent. Turn it around, and another reality is revealed: knots, crossings, loose ends and the physical construction that produced the visible image. Translation similarly refuses the illusion that literature arrives before us in an immaculate, self-sufficient form. Behind the translated sentence stands another sentence, and between them stands a human being making decisions. [carcanet.co.uk]

A materialist criticism begins from much the same reversal. It turns the apparently autonomous cultural object over. It asks what the completed surface conceals: who made it, under what conditions, through which institutions, for which audience and under whose ownership. If Manguel’s metaphor is pursued beyond the boundaries he establishes for it, therefore, the reverse side of the tapestry leads from literary aesthetics into political economy. The difficulty is that Manguel, having turned over the tapestry, remains fascinated principally by its threads. He cares less about the loom.

A lover rather than a specialist

Manguel, born in Buenos Aires in 1948, has held a remarkable position in contemporary literary life as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, editor, and former director of the National Library of Argentina. Carcanet Press describes him as Argentine-Canadian and notes that he now lives in Lisbon. His career has always resisted easy professional categorisation. He belongs to the old republic of letters, moving between languages, libraries, literary histories and forms.

Translation is not for him an abstract subject. Carcanet Press notes that Manguel has translated Jorge Luis Borges and Marguerite Yourcenar into English and Katherine Mansfield and Paul Éluard into Spanish. This practical experience matters because his argument rests upon translation as an exceptionally intimate encounter between reader and text. Translating means penetrating beneath the apparent transparency of words into questions of voice, rhythm, ambiguity and intention.

The publisher approvingly reproduces George Steiner’s description of Manguel as an “amateur” in the older, more generous sense of the word: “a lover rather than a specialist”. That characterisation captures both what makes Manguel’s writing attractive and what eventually limits it. His criticism refuses the bureaucratised compartmentalisation of contemporary academic life. For him, literature is a continuous historical conversation. A biblical text can illuminate a modern novel; Cervantes can supply an image through which the modern translator's predicament becomes intelligible.

There is something genuinely valuable here. Against reducing reading to the acquisition of information, Manguel insists on attention. Translation reveals that words cannot simply be exchanged like identical units of currency. To translate is already to interpret. The translator must decide. No dictionary can abolish those decisions because a sentence's meaning never resides exclusively in the individual meanings of the words that compose it. Tone, social register, historical association, irony, rhythm and the relationship of one sentence to everything surrounding it continually intervene. A translator consequently produces a reading of the original even where they strive for the greatest possible fidelity.

Here Manguel’s defence of translation rises above the merely antiquarian. Translation exposes something fundamental about literature itself. The apparently transparent act of reading involves interpretation, historical knowledge, comparison, and judgement. The translated text embodies this process. But at precisely this point another question presents itself. If translation is intellectual activity, interpretation and creation, then the translator is not merely the invisible intermediary between two literary personalities. The translator is also a worker.

Translation and the struggle over who may read

The political importance of translation long predates the contemporary publishing industry. The history of translating texts is inseparable from struggles over access to knowledge and over who possesses the authority to interpret it. The history of the vernacular Bible provides one of the clearest examples. William Tyndale’s English translation of scripture belonged to a tremendous transformation produced by printing, religious upheaval and the development of vernacular literacy. The issue was never simply whether one rendering of a Greek or Hebrew word was superior to another. Behind disputes over translation lay the far more dangerous question of whether ordinary people needed an established clerical hierarchy to mediate between themselves and sacred texts.

The subsequent history of revolutionary England reveals what could follow once texts and arguments escaped older institutional monopolies. The enormous expansion of pamphleteering and popular religious controversy accompanying the English Revolution allowed artisans, soldiers, preachers and political radicals to intervene directly in questions previously claimed as the preserve of churchmen, lawyers and rulers. Levellers, Diggers and religious radicals found within vernacular religious and political languages the means to formulate increasingly explosive questions about authority, representation, property and equality.

Translation in this sense belongs to the history of democratisation, but not in the comfortable meaning the term later acquired. Making forbidden, restricted or otherwise inaccessible texts available to wider populations could destabilise established authority. It altered not simply what people read but who could participate in intellectual and political argument. The same process took on an increasingly international character as bourgeois society grew. Philosophical, scientific and political works circulated beyond the linguistic environments in which they had originated. Ideas crossed frontiers that states, churches, and ruling classes repeatedly tried to police. Translation became one mechanism through which intellectual life acquired its genuinely international character.

The development of the socialist workers’ movement gave this process an entirely new historical significance. The writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and later the vast literature generated by socialist movements worldwide, could not have become the theoretical inheritance of an international working class without translation. Translating socialist literature was not an ornamental supplement to political activity. It formed part of the movement’s practical work of education and organisation.

This history points towards something only partially captured by a liberal-humanist celebration of translation as intercultural understanding. Languages do not meet one another in some realm floating above society. Human beings speaking different languages encounter each other through migrations, empires, wars, trade, intellectual exchange and class struggle. Translation is therefore necessarily historical. The reverse of the tapestry is already beginning to look much more complicated.

The translator as worker

Manguel approaches translation above all as a man of letters contemplating a craft. But translation is also an occupation situated within the capitalist publishing industry. This distinction matters because the romantic language surrounding literary production has always served an ideological function. Writing, translating, illustrating and editing can be presented as callings whose supposedly privileged proximity to culture somehow places them outside ordinary questions of remuneration and working conditions. Yet precisely because many people undertake intellectual labour from genuine commitment, their attachment to the activity can itself become a mechanism through which poorly rewarded conditions are normalised.

The organisations representing translators make clear that contracts, payment and rights are not secondary concerns. Britain’s Translators Association, part of the Society of Authors, describes itself as the collective voice of literary translators and advises members on translator-publisher contracts and negotiating payment. It also says explicitly that it campaigns for translators’ rights and fairer working conditions.

The evidence from the United States points in the same direction. The Authors Guild states that literary translation requires creativity, talent, and skill. Still, translators’ work is often overlooked or taken for granted, including through failures to provide proper credit or ongoing royalties. Its model translation contract was created specifically to provide translators with a basis for negotiating better terms.

Such mundane contractual matters expose the social side of Manguel’s elevated conception of translation. If translation is profound reading, then somebody must be paid to undertake that reading. If it requires sustained intellectual attention, somebody must possess the time in which that attention can occur. If the finished translation embodies interpretative and creative judgement, the translator’s right to credit, remuneration and a continuing interest in the exploitation of that work cannot be dismissed as matters external to culture.

The Authors Guild’s model contract gives this struggle particularly concrete expression. Its proposed clauses include a translation fee alongside royalties from print, electronic and audiobook editions and shares from the licensing of subsidiary rights. The Guild notes that payment arrangements vary widely between publishers. The very necessity for such model provisions reveals the contradiction behind romantic conceptions of literary translation. Culture may be discussed in the vocabulary of inspiration, interpretation and artistic fidelity, but the translator ultimately confronts a contract. The capitalist commodity does not cease to be a commodity because the object being bought and sold happens to be a book.

The new pressure of artificial intelligence

The social contradiction becomes sharper with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence. Here the argument must avoid two equally unsatisfactory positions. One is technological romanticism, which treats human cultural activity as possessing a mystical essence that machinery can never approach. The other is technological determinism, which holds that the ability to automate part of an activity demonstrates the historical inevitability of replacing the humans performing it.

Neither begins with the decisive question: under whose control technology is introduced, for what social purpose, and who reaps the benefits?

Translators' concerns about generative AI are not hypothetical. The Translators Association states that it is “deeply engaged” in protecting translators’ rights and their craft in the age of AI and says it has called for solidarity with human translators whose livelihoods are threatened by generative AI. Meanwhile, the Authors Guild has incorporated provisions on generative AI into its literary translation model contract.

The Society of Authors additionally advises those negotiating fees to establish a commissioner’s policy concerning AI and says it expects consent to be sought before AI is given access to authors’ materials. These developments demonstrate that AI is already an issue of rights, remuneration and control within literary work, not simply a philosophical argument about whether machines can translate.

This is where Manguel’s conception of translation becomes unexpectedly radical in its implications. If translation genuinely represents an especially intense form of reading, then translating cannot adequately be understood as the mechanical conversion of linguistic units. It embodies interpretation. But a materialist criticism should go further. The central problem is not deciding whether a machine output is “really” translation according to some abstract philosophical definition. The more important question is what happens to human labour when automated systems are introduced into publishing under capitalist ownership.

Machinery under capitalism has repeatedly been presented as liberation from labour, while workers experience it as intensified exploitation, unemployment, deskilling, or loss of control over the labour process. The contradiction arises not fundamentally from machinery itself, but from the social relations governing its use. AI potentially contains enormously progressive possibilities. Technology capable of overcoming linguistic barriers could enormously broaden international access to culture, historical documents, scientific research and everyday human communication. For socialists, there is no interest in defending unnecessary drudgery merely because humans previously performed it.

But under capitalist relations the central criterion governing technological adoption is not the enrichment of human experience. It is profitability. That distinction transforms the AI debate. The question should not be posed simply as “human translator versus machine”. Both are trapped within a social organisation of production that subordinates technological development to private accumulation. The genuine alternative would be to use advances in automation to reduce necessary labour while expanding the time and resources available for higher forms of cultural, intellectual and creative activity. In such circumstances AI might become an instrument available to translators rather than an economic weapon deployed against them. 

Translation against nationalism

There is another reason translation should concern Marxists. In practice, the activity contradicts the nationalist mythology that cultures exist as self-contained, internally homogeneous organisms. Every translated book is evidence against such isolation. Languages continually absorb, transform and appropriate elements from one another. Literature develops through these exchanges. National traditions themselves emerge within international processes.

Marx and Engels recognised this tendency extraordinarily early. Capitalism created a world market and drew previously isolated national economies into an increasingly interconnected global system. Cultural production developed internationally alongside this process. Yet capitalism's contradiction is that economic life grows ever more global while political power remains organised through rival capitalist nation-states. Translation occupies one of the cultural pressure points created by this contradiction. It demonstrates the objective internationalism of culture while remaining embedded in national markets, publishing structures, and economic power inequalities.

Not all linguistic exchanges therefore occur between equals. Some languages dominate the international publishing market while others remain peripheral. Which authors receive translation, which works obtain international distribution and which disappear outside their original languages are not purely literary decisions. Markets and institutions shape them. Consequently, the existence of world literature does not abolish material inequality any more than the world market abolishes national inequality. It reproduces these contradictions on a cultural level.

Yet translation contains another possibility. It makes available humanity's accumulated imaginative and intellectual experience across geographical and historical boundaries. The same activity that capitalism turns into a specialised market also points beyond cultural nationalism towards the conception of culture as a genuinely common human inheritance.

Literature and the commodity

Here lies the deeper limitation of Manguel’s liberal humanism. Books and readers, libraries and writers, memories and conversations populate his intellectual world. This world is real, and defending it against intellectual impoverishment matters. But the danger is that the library becomes an idealised refuge from society rather than one of society’s products. Books cannot escape the commodity form merely because their content transcends it.

A publishing house must purchase or control rights, commission work, produce an edition, market it and sell copies. Authors and translators must earn their living. Distribution channels determine what reaches readers. The survival of literary works may depend upon libraries and public institutions whose budgets are themselves products of political struggle.

The cultural object consequently possesses the same double character that capitalism imposes elsewhere. It is simultaneously something created because human beings possess the need to express and understand their experience and something produced and circulated within definite economic structures. This does not diminish literature. On the contrary, understanding its material conditions makes a more serious defence possible.

Manguel’s tapestry metaphor permits precisely this kind of investigation. Once the work is turned around, we discover not only interpretative knots but a division of labour: author, translator, editor, designer, printer, distributor, bookseller, librarian and reader. Behind them stand institutions, technologies and property relations. The reverse side of the tapestry becomes society itself.

From humanism to materialism

The attraction of The Reverse Side of the Tapestry is therefore inseparable from its limitation. Manguel protects something genuinely precious: attentive reading, historical memory, linguistic subtlety and the conviction that literature creates relationships across languages and centuries. A Marxist criticism has no reason to reject this inheritance. Marxism did not arise through hostility to the achievements of human culture. It sought the social conditions under which those achievements would no longer remain the effective privilege of minorities. The difference lies elsewhere.

Liberal humanism ultimately appeals to enlightened individuals and institutions to protect culture. Materialism asks what social conditions culture needs to flourish and what forces have an interest in creating them. The translator therefore presents in miniature a much larger problem. How can serious intellectual work survive when the time needed to carry it out is continually measured against profitability? How can literature fulfil its universal possibilities while its production and distribution remain governed by private property? How can technological advances become instruments for enlarging human freedom rather than mechanisms for reducing labour costs?

These are not questions peculiar to translation. Writers, musicians, actors, researchers, journalists, designers and innumerable other cultural workers confront different forms of the same contradiction. The technology capable of distributing cultural works to billions exists alongside commercial and proprietary structures that seek to enclose intellectual production. Never has humanity possessed technological means of cultural communication remotely comparable to those available today, yet never has the pressure to translate attention, creativity and knowledge into measurable commercial value been more pervasive. The defence of culture therefore cannot finally depend upon nostalgia for a supposedly pre-technological literary civilisation. Nor can it depend upon persuading corporations to behave more benevolently towards creative workers. The problem is social. 

Alberto Manguel, Alexander Voronsky and the Struggle for Artistic Truth

Translation occupies a peculiar position within literature. The translator creates sentences without being their original author, interprets while resisting the temptation to replace the author, and necessarily changes a work's linguistic form while trying to preserve what made that form artistically meaningful. This raises the fundamental question confronting every serious translator: what in a work of literature must survive its passage from one language into another? Alberto Manguel and the Marxist literary critic Alexander Voronsky offer complementary answers.

For Manguel, translation begins with reading. In The Translator as Reader, he describes reading as a way to know more about the world and ourselves. He identifies the translator as potentially its most refined and knowledgeable practitioner. In The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation, he develops this preoccupation with translation as an exceptionally intense form of reading. The translator cannot remain a passive recipient of meaning. Every sentence demands interpretation: rhythm, ambiguity, historical association and tone must first be recognised before they can be recreated.

Voronsky approaches the problem from another direction. For him, genuine art constitutes a particular form of cognition. In On Art, he argues that art apprehends reality, human thoughts and feelings through concrete images rather than through abstract propositions. Artistic cognition depends upon intuition, although intuition does not eliminate technique or conscious analysis.

Placed beside Manguel's conception of the translator as reader, this provides the basis for a richer conception of translation. The translator must not merely discover what the words say. The deeper task is to recover the artistic cognition contained within them.

A mechanically accurate translation can therefore remain artistically false. Every word might possess a plausible dictionary equivalent while rhythm is destroyed, irony flattened, ambiguity explained away, and differences between characters' voices homogenised. Information survives while literature disappears. Conversely, unrestricted adaptation can become equally false by replacing the author's artistic discovery with the translator's preferences.

Voronsky's discussion of the painter Mikhailov in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina illuminates the difficulty. He emphasises the artist's capacity to penetrate appearances, discovering the significant and characteristic beneath what obscures it. He adopts Tolstoy's metaphor of“removing the veils” to describe this artistic process. The genuine artist does not merely copy appearances but reveals something about reality that previously remained concealed. [marxists.org]

The translator confronts something analogous. Language itself has become a veil that must be removed and preserved at once. Russian cannot simply become English without transformation. Syntax, sounds, idioms and historical associations differ. Yet the translator must find an equivalent way to let another reader encounter the artistic relationships embodied in the original.

Here Manguel's translator as reader and Voronsky's artist as discoverer converge. The translator becomes a reader compelled to demonstrate the depth of a reading through recreation. An ordinary reader can pass over an ambiguity unnoticed. A critic can subsequently revise an interpretation. The translator must repeatedly decide what the ambiguity, rhythm or image is doing and choose words that recreate its function.

This labour also has a profoundly historical dimension. Languages carry the accumulated experiences of societies. Words carry associations shaped by history, social conflict, and cultural development. Translation therefore mediates between historical worlds as well as between vocabularies. Making a nineteenth-century Russian writer sound casually twenty-first-century may erase something essential; manufacturing artificial archaism can falsify the work just as seriously.

This explains translation's importance to world culture. It challenges the confinement of literature within national boundaries by allowing artistic discoveries produced in one language and historical experience to become available within another. Reading crosses boundaries of time and place; translation materially facilitates that encounter.

A historical irony lies in Voronsky's own case. His return to English-speaking readers itself depended heavily upon translation. Frederick S. Choate, translator of Art as the Cognition of Life, explained that little of Voronsky's critical writings had previously appeared in English and that translating them helped recover a major Marxist literary figure suppressed under Stalinism. Here translation became an instrument of historical recovery. [wsws.org]

Manguel helps us understand why the translator must be an extraordinary reader; Voronsky helps identify what that reading seeks: the cognition of life embodied in artistic form. The translator must therefore create to preserve and transform, to remain faithful. At its greatest, translation does not merely carry words between languages. It lets one society's artistic discovery of life live again within another language.

Who owns the loom?

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry remains an elegant and humane contribution to the literature of translation. According to its publisher, the book explicitly approaches literary translation as the translator’s craft and as an exceptionally intense form of reading. At the same time, Manguel brings his own substantial experience translating major writers between English and Spanish. These qualities make the book worth taking seriously. But its central metaphor ultimately demands to be carried further than liberal humanism permits. Translation is interpretation, certainly. But interpretation requires time, knowledge, training and labour. Labour takes place under social conditions. Those conditions involve contracts, remuneration and property. And property raises the question of class.

The development of artificial intelligence merely makes this chain of relationships more visible. The fundamental issue is not whether technological development should be halted to preserve every existing cultural occupation unchanged. Such a programme would be neither achievable nor desirable. The question is instead whether technological progress will be subordinated to private profit or consciously employed to extend human freedom and culture.

A socialist organisation of cultural production would not erect barriers between technology and creativity. It would seek to free both from their subordination to profit. Automation capable of reducing routine work should increase the time human beings possess for education, thought, creativity and leisure rather than threatening their livelihoods. The increasingly international circulation of culture should become the basis for fuller human communication rather than another field for corporate accumulation.

Translation demonstrates particularly vividly why this question cannot finally be resolved nationally. Translators inhabit the spaces between languages by profession. Their work testifies every day to the inadequacy of national boundaries as containers for human culture. The defence of their labour therefore points logically to workers' broader international interests.

Manguel begins from the back of the tapestry. It is an inspired metaphor because every apparently seamless work of art conceals the process through which it came into existence. Turn it over, and the order of the finished image dissolves into knots and crossed threads. The observer discovers construction where only beauty had appeared.

But turn it over far enough and something more becomes visible. Someone selected the material. Someone developed the skill required to work it. Someone performed the labour. Someone determined the pattern. And within a class society, someone controls the conditions under which that labour is undertaken and the product distributed. That is where a materialist criticism must begin where Manguel stops.

The Reverse Side of the Tapestry asks us to admire the hidden threads that make literature possible. The task today is to follow those threads from the book into society itself: from translation to labour, from labour to property, and from property to class. The decisive question is no longer merely what we discover when we turn the tapestry over. It is who does the weaving, and who owns the loom?

  

Bibliography

Authors Guild. “Literary Translation Model Contract.” 14 April 2021. The Guild describes the model contract as intended to promote fair contractual terms and payment for literary translators and includes provisions concerning generative AI.

Authors Guild. “Negotiating Literary Translation Contracts.” 2 June 2022. Discussion of translation fees, royalties, credit and rights. [authorsguild.org]

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Part II, 1615.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845.

Lenin, V. I. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. 1916.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. London: Flamingo, 1997.

Manguel, Alberto. The Reverse Side of the Tapestry: Notes on the Art of Translation. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2026. Carcanet lists the paperback at £14.99, ISBN 9781800175808, with publication on 24 September 2026. [carcanet.co.uk]

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848.

Society of Authors. “Rates and Fees.” Guidance addressing payment, rights and the use of AI in commissioned work. [societyofauthors.org]