Translations Quotes - Page 16

• Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.

  Salman Rushdie

  Men, World, Lost

  Salman Rushdie (2017). “Home: Vintage Minis”, p.32, Random House

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• In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

  Christopher Paolini

  Writing, Lyrical, Strive

  "An Hour with Paolini". Christopher Paolini's talk/question panel at the Christchurch Armageddon Expo in New Zealand, impishidea.com. June 30, 2012.

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• Translators have to prove to themselves as to others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have a "flair" for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.

  Mona Baker

  Effort, Language, Conscious

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• I have an all-Japanese design team, and none of them speak English. So it's often funny and surprising how my ideas end up lost in translation.

  Pharrell Williams

  Team, Speak English, Ideas

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Literature, Language, Excellent

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• A written discourse on any subject is bound to contain much that is fanciful.

  Plato

  Language, Discourse, Subjects

  Plato, R. Hackforth (1952). “Plato: Phaedrus”, p.161, Cambridge University Press

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• It is part of the business of marketing to muddy the distinction between altruism and cynicism.

  Don Watson

  Marketing, Language, Cynicism

  Don Watson (2006). “Death Sentences: How Cliches, Weasel Words and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language”, Gotham

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• Khairani Barokka is a writer, spoken-word poet, visual artist and performer whose work has a strong vein of activism, particularly around disability, but also how this intersects with, for example, issues of gender - she's campaigned for reproductive rights in her native Indonesian, and is currently studying for a PhD in disability and visual cultures at Goldsmiths. She's written a feminist, environmentalist, anti-colonialist narrative poem, with tactile artwork and a Braille translation. How could I not publish that?

  Deborah Smith

  Strong, Artist, Rights

  Source: thequietus.com

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• I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

  Paul Auster

  Play

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 5, 2009.

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• Some of my colleagues are surprised by how little personal interaction I've had with "my" authors, but I don't translate to go fishing for friends. Part of me suspects that they wouldn't like me, or that I wouldn't like them, which would inevitably get in the way of the mission. None of the theory built around translation matters to me anyway: much of the process, I find, is intuitive.

  Andre Naffis-Sahely

  Fishing, Littles, Matter

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• [On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.

  Sarah Moore Grimke

  Bible, Reading, Writing

  Sarah Moore Grimké, Mary S. Parker (1838). “Letters on the equality of the sexes, and the condition of woman: Addressed to Mary S. Parker”, p.16

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• We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, Fiction, World

  "Crash". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1973.

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• A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Language, Difficulty, Precise

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• In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.

  George Henry Lewes

  Effort, Adequate, May

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “The Life of Goethe”, p.466

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• A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

  Victor Hugo

  Impossible, Absurd, Verses

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• The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

  Philip Pullman

  Robins, Becoming, Cages

  Philip Pullman (2012). “Grimm Tales: For Young and Old”, p.15, Penguin UK

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• Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen machtwillen, und wo die macht den vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.
  Translation: Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

  Carl Jung

  Life, Love Is, Shadow

  šber die Psychologie des Unbewussten (On the Psychology of the Unconscious, 1917) in Gesammelte Werke (1964) vol. 7, p. 58

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• Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather. And it lives.

  Jessica Day George

  Sleep, Men, Animal

  Jessica Day George (2011). “Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow”, p.223, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Way, Lost

  Robert Frost (1961). “Conversations on the Craft of Poetry”

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• The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.

  Craig Ferguson

  Men, Hands, Half

  Craig Ferguson (2010). “Between the Bridge and the River: A Novel”, p.214, Chronicle Books

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• I've started researching online journals for the project. Thanks for decoding Dr. Heller's notes before sending them to me. If you'd have forwarded them to me without a translation, I'd be searching for a tall building/overpass/water tower from which to yell "goodbye cruel world.

  Tammara Webber

  Goodbye, Water, Drs

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• Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Reading, Perception, Mind

  Siri Hustvedt (2012). “Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays”, p.133, Macmillan

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• I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old books, the older the better - Tolstoy, Poe, Jacobean tragedies, a dusty translation of Laclos - so that when I finally resurfaced, blinking and dazzled, it took me days to stop thinking in their cool, polished, crystalline rhythms.

  Tana French

  Book, Thinking, Years

  "In the Woods". Book by Tana French, January 30, 2007.

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• Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.

  Anne Waldman

  Wise, Jewels, Erotic

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• These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.

  Jorie Graham

  Powerful, Passion, Writing

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