1 He is one of the truly great war correspondents, a monumental figure who reported from Afghanistan (阿富汗) for 20 years and won almost every literary prize offered in Italy; he is a writer whose description of his country's troubled history overthrows both official versions. They are some of the most important voices in the world today, honored intellectuals in their own countries. In the English-speaking world, in fact, major publishing houses are inexplicably resistant to any kind of translated material at all. The statistics are shocking in this age of so-called globalization. 2 In the United States and Britain, only 2 to 3 percent of books published each year are translations, compared with almost 35 percent in Latin America and Western Europe. But this is no mere national embarrassment. The dearth of translated literature in the English-speaking world represents a new kind of iron curtain we have constructed around ourselves. 3 We are choosing to block off access to the writing of a large and significant portion of the world, including movements and societies whose potentially dreadful political impact on us is made even more menacing by our general lack of familiarity with them. Publishers have their excuses, of course. 4 This is nothing but a publishing shibboleth (准则；教条) that leads to a chicken-and-egg question: Is a limited readership for translations the reason why so few are published in the English world? Or is that readership limited because English-language publishers provide their readers with so few translations? Certainly, the number of readers of literature—in any language-is on the decline, and serious, dedicated editors face real difficulties bringing good books to the marketplace. But that is not the fault of translation. 5 On the contrary, we need to ask what we lose as readers and as a society if we lose access to translated literature by voluntarily reducing its presence in our community or quietly standing by as it is drastically and arbitrarily reduced.