The tears of the translator

Sometimes it really is worth tidying up - you find treasures in the piles of stuff on the floor which you'd half forgotten about. So today after tidying my office I came across Michel Orcel's Les Larmes du traducteur - The translator's tears.
A book I haven't yet properly started reading let alone finished but that hasn't stopped me using its wonderful title for sermons - we clergy are just magpies really!
It is a great metaphor for what it can be like to translate, to cope with the grief of the loss sometimes between one language and another. The tears can also be tears of joy at finding something that "works", that is right; but the tears can also be of frustration and fatigue - translation can be hard labour.
But here is the wonderful origin of Orcel's book.
In October 1999 he arrives in Marrakech, Marocco, to translate from Italian into French what he describes as "an embarassing and paradoxical work". The work is called La Jérusalem Libérée by Torquato Tasso, it sings the praises of the deliverance of Jerusalem by the Crusaders. Le Tasse took 15 years to write it and 20 years unfelicitously ammending the original.
Orcel, who is a writer, translator and psychoanalyst, describes his own book as a "hybrid" and as "une expérience de 'translation'". I suppose that you could almost translate "translation" in this context as "displacement" or perhaps more "being taken to a new place" - being translated into another dimension.
The book is a journal of his time in Marocco, of the people and atmosphere of that place, and of his struggles to translate, to find the right word. And he consciously chooses to translate epic poetry about the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in an Islamic country. It is a delight and the perfect book for reading on the bus. However much as I shall continue to enjoy reading it, I am glad for the moment not to be struggling with a translation of it into English, fun as that might be one day.
"Les musulmans nomment Jérusalem Al-Qods. C'est la même ville. Ce n'est pas le même lieu de l'esprit. Si ce livre témoigne malgré lui de quelque chose, c'est de cette indétermination des signes qui fait à la fois notre désespoir et la beauté d'un monde qui s'effrite dans l'uniformité."
Rather than sit here weeping about how to get that fiendishly difficult last sentence into English I'm going to cook supper and have a glass of cold white wine.