Do translations! This is the invitation I want to make, relaying and rephrasing – deliberately countering – the advice I once received. Yes, yes and absolutely. Do translations, for the simple reason that we need them. We need translations, urgently: it is through translation that we are able to reach the literatures written in the languages we don’t or can’t read, from the places where we don’t or can’t live, offering us the chance of understanding as well as the necessary and instructive experience of failing to understand them, of being confused and challenged by them.