... a translation issues from the original — not so much
from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes
later than the original...
Walter Benjamin, ' The Task of the Translator'

In 1980 Raymond Williams published a book with the, to me,
rather daunting title of Problems in Materialism and Culture. I
had studied what was then still called English Literature at
university but I had neither read, nor indeed been encouraged
to read anything by Williams.I had, to put it briefly, no idea
what the word 'materialism' meant; and that, indeed, was why
I bought the book. And the first piece I read in the book, out of
a kind of vague, idle curiosity, was entitled, ' The Welsh
Industrial Novel'. I say that I read it out of idle curiosity
because even though I had been born and had grown up in
Cardiff — and from adolescence onwards had been very
interested in what I thought of as Literature — I had no idea
that there was such a thing as a Welsh industrial novel.In fact,
I would have been hard pressed to name, and I had certainly
not read, a Welsh novel of any kind.But what is of most
interest to me now, looking back, is that I was not at all
surprised by this. I read Williams's lecture rather as a tourist
might read a guide book, with a mixture of genuine curiosity,
duty and inattention.It was as though it had never occurred to