I was asked this week how I would feel about my next book being translated into Russian. Some writers, my agent said, were refusing on moral grounds. Others had responded that way to the invasion of Ukraine but since changed their minds.I thought about it. This isn’t a decision taken for money. Naturally some changes hands, but the translation of literary fiction is rarely big business. There’d be no temptation to traduce myself for the sums at stake.The question, then, is whether I want my writing to be available to Russians in Russia. The argument against doing so would be that even the tiniest contribution to the Russian economy might indirectly fuel military aggression. Having for decades – through various wars and acts of government nastiness – paid British taxes, I’m unconvinced by the idea that there is clean money, or that punishing small publishing houses might change government policy.Moral purity is not available to anyone living in late-stage capitalism because the structures and systems in which we live are designed to make the rich richer. Individually, we balance resistance, compromise and co-operation. It’s a matter of where you draw the line on the continuum of collaboration: for me, yes to short-haul flights for work, no to flying for leisure. Yes to owning an iPhone, no to social media and AI. I don’t think my lines should be everyone’s lines, but I draw them where I stand.Some writers refuse to be translated into the languages of people whose state representatives they disdain. This works better for national than regional or global languages. If a writer for some reason believed that the people of, say, Hungary had set themselves beyond the bounds of decency (I don’t), it would be straightforward to decline Hungarian translation and thereby deprive monolingual Hungarians of a book.But what if you’re happy with the electorate of Spain but object to the government of Argentina? More people speak French in West Africa than in Europe, so if a writer were to refuse French translation on some political grounds (I’m sure someone has reasons) the readers of Senegal would suffer as much. Languages, like other art forms, travel.I am skirting the issue of English, because what I decided in the end is that if I’m okay with being published in the US – and I am more than okay with that, delighted and, like many Irish households, to some extent dependent on the American market – it’s not clear to me on what moral basis I would refuse publication in Putin’s Russia while signing gratefully for Trump’s America.I read translated literature partly because it shows me the world through windows I’ll never see. Translation invites readers to new points of view and the understanding of ideas and perspectives we don’t encounter in daily life. We might say that literary translation is by definition an act of resistance to repression and autocracy, and by depriving ourselves and others of such acts of resistance we decline an opportunity to make a (tiny) difference.[ I have many beloved friends, but I’ve never been part of a gangOpens in new window ]If I thought my books tended to support acts of war and nationalist expansion, I would be right not to want them in the hands of people already that way inclined, or living under the rule of leaders that way inclined. Since I don’t think that, since I think that when I write I pay attention to the love of our shared world, I don’t fear that my books will buttress oppression or justify violence into whoever’s hands they may fall.I dislike the politics of many world leaders, including those of the nations to which I might assert belonging, and so in all likelihood do most of my readers, anglophone and otherwise.I don’t think that power-crazed old men running big countries are likely to read literary fiction by a European woman, but if they were to do so I’m confident that it wouldn’t make them worse. I don’t think it very likely that people who already support power-crazed old men will read my books either, though if they did, maybe their minds would be just fractionally changed. It’s much more likely that the (few) people who buy and read my work in Russia are, like the happily-not-so-few who buy and read my work in the US, dismayed by and ashamed of their leaders, reading for all the reasons people read fiction – which include resistance to corrupt reality. The answer to dangerous bigotry is more art and more communication, not less.