Translations Quotes - Page 11

• By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Reason, Instruction

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• I don't speak any languages well enough to make an expert assessment on writing in translation, but since I'm interested in awkwardness in prose, I find I like the way translated texts can sometimes acquire awkwardness in the process of translation. There's a discordance translation can create which I think is sometimes seen as a weakness but which I think can be a really interesting aspect of the text.

  Katie Kitamura

  Writing, Thinking, Interesting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There are certain writers I can't read when I'm trying to write because their voices are so distinct. Cormac McCarthy, he's the most different writer from anything I've ever written, but there's something about those really spare sentences that is just tough - it would be too much of an influence. Grace Paley is my favorite writer. Her stuff is so voice-driven, when I read her a lot I want to make my writing more voice-y and dialogue-heavy. I love a lot of stuff in translation.

  Molly Antopol

  Writing, Grace, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I did translations of Grimms' Fairy Tales and became very charmed about that way of looking at things. Fairy tales tell a lot of truths. Just as a side point, for instance, we always think the bad guys in fairy tales are the stepmothers, who are witches. But where are the fathers when the witches are killing and mishandling their children? Away. They are on a business trip. They are hunting, they are away. Wow, you know! No one says the fathers are the bad guys! It's one of the things you don't say. But my goodness, where are they?

  Lore Segal

  Children, Father, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas.

  Chitra Ganesh

  Art, Moving, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.

  Idra Novey

  Book, Writing, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have a deep love for the art of translation, and I couldn't find a novel that captured the fascinating, reckless adventure of it as I'd experienced it, or portrayed translators as the passionate risk-takers that so many of the translators I know are. So I wrote the book I couldn't find.

  Idra Novey

  Art, Book, Adventure

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Rather than thinking of sound and sense in my essays as two opposing principles, two perpendicular trajectories, as they are often considered in conversations around translation, or even as two disassociated phenomena that can be brought together to collaborate with more or less success, I think of sound as sense. Sound has its own meaning, and it's one of the many non-semantic dimensions of meaning in language. I want to emphasize is the formal dynamic between language-as-information and language-as-art-material.

  Cole Swensen

  Thinking, Together, Language

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was very lucky. I don't know German, or Dutch, or Chinese, or Thai. I don't know them, so I can't judge, so I have to go on the word of the publisher that it's a good translation.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Judging, Chinese, Goes On

  "Talking in Our Pajamas: A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros on Finding Your Voice, Fear of Highways, Tacos, Travel, and the Need for Peace in the World". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. 2008.

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• Not that I ever felt the necessity of proving that all human beings suffer the same way, feel joy the same way, but it happened on my way - when I get close to these people, just by the simple intervention of translation I can actually reach them and ask them something, and their reaction is as I expected. I see that the relationship goes so smoothly, and I realize that cultural languages and specificities are nothing but simple obstacles that you can easily overcome. It's obvious that human beings are the same wherever they are.

  Abbas Kiarostami

  Simple, People, Joy

  "They Should Be Grateful: An Interview with Abbas Kiarostami". Interview with Zachary Wigon, filmmakermagazine.com. February 13, 2013.

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• "Lost in Translation" by Sofia Coppola. It's a masterpiece. I laughed a lot but was also overwhelmed by the story - a rare combination.

  Emmanuelle Bercot

  Stories, Overwhelmed, Lost

  "Emmanuelle Bercot on Portraying the Juvenile Justice System in Cannes 2015 Opener ‘Standing Tall’". Interview with Laura Berger, www.indiewire.com. March 29, 2016.

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• Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.

  Hal Duncan

  Mean, Errors, Names

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• We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction.

  Ciro Guerra

  Names, Together, Fiction

  "'Serpent' Film Explores, Revives Lost Cultural Knowledge For Colombians". "Weekend Edition Sunday" with Tom Cole, www.npr.org. February 21, 2016.

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• The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained by translation, and the answer is everything. Our language is a compendium of translation.

  Sam Hamill

  Intelligent, Answers, World

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• One of the things I love about translation is it obliterates the self. When I'm trying to figure out what Tu Fu has to say, I have to kind of impersonate Tu Fu. I have to take on, if you will, his voice and his skin in English, and I have to try to get as deeply into the poem as possible. I'm not trying to make an equivalent poem in English, which can't be done because our language can't accommodate the kind of metaphors within metaphors the Chinese written language can, and often does, contain.

  Sam Hamill

  Voice, Self, Chinese

  Interview with Anne-Marie Cusac, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. March 31, 2003.

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• True to their history, the English are very domineering and have manipulated it in different ways. I wouldn't say that there was an original, but there is a lot of expurgation in some of the Victorian translations, and there's a lot of additional salacious nonsense in some of them, too. I also like the early French one, much-derided for being fanciful but which is actually very elegantly done. It's very big, very capacious.

  Marina Warner

  Different, Done, Way

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well... English has fallen short.

  Marina Warner

  Beautiful, Book, Italian

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Reading, Would Be, Benefits

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Meaning can be usually be approximated, but often by sacrificing style. When I review my translations into Spanish, that's what I'm most concerned with, reading the sentences aloud in Spanish to make sure they sound the way I want them to. To be honest, I much prefer being translated into Greek or Japanese; in those cases, you have no way of being involved, and no pressure.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Reading, Sacrifice, Greek

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside.

  Daniel Alarcon

  Latin, America, Radio

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I read the different translations of the Bible they had and really just dove into it, almost so I could prove it all right.

  Christian Hosoi

  Different, Dove, Prove It

  Source: theindiespiritualist.com

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• When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All you can do is to fail in the least egregious way possible.

  Jay L. Garfield

  Way, Failing, Betray

  "Buddhist howls". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. December 28, 2012..

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• I did my BA in English lit, and hated the restriction - I'd always read more in translation than not; coming from a working-class background, what I knew of as British literature - the writers who made big prize lists and/or were stocked in WH Smith, Doncaster's only bookshop until I was 17 - seemed incredibly, alienatingly middle-class. Then in 2009, just after the financial crash, I graduated with no more specific skill than 'can analyse a bit of poetry'.

  Deborah Smith

  Class, Skills, Literature

  Source: thequietus.com

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• As a matter of fact, one of the things in Obamacare is that for the elderly, every five years you must have end-of-life counseling. Translation: suicide counseling.

  Rafael Cruz

  Suicide, Obamacare, Elderly

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• One of the producers, Wonjo, was an amazing interpreter. I don't think we really knew how it was going to work at the beginning. Yet it was something that a couple of days into it seemed so seamless and it wasn't something that we noticed or thought about. A couple of times I cornered him and forced him to speak English but we didn't speak much English at all. That said, I don't think anything was ever lost in translation. It was all very easy.

  Mia Wasikowska

  Couple, Thinking, Speak English

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

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