Looking through publishers' websites, trying to find appropriate places to submit the translation of Vladimir Frumkin's book Singers and Rulers, I noticed on the YUP site an interview with Carla Baricz, the translator of Exiled Shadow by Norman Manea (which I edited). And found this:

I still ended up choosing literature [as a career] because, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, it was the best place to get the news. Literature was where, I felt, all the important conversations were taking place. It was where all the science, art, music, and philosophy filtered down to be argued about and perpetually be made new. It was also where the unremarkable and the quotidian found meaningful representation. In fact, I felt that given its power to speak to such a broad range of human experiences, all literature could be seen as wisdom literature, a universal corpus crisscrossing geographies, temporalities, and traditions to engage us in the conversations that truly mattered.