Translations Quotes - Page 4

• Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

  Marilyn Hacker

  Writing, Together, Different

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• Structure is translation software for your imagination.

  James Scott Bell

  Imagination, Structure, Software

  James Scott Bell (2016). “Just Write: Creating Unforgettable Fiction and a Rewarding Writing Life”, p.127, "F+W Media, Inc."

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• THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig’s glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna’s golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.

  Ronald Harwood

  Yesterday, Age, Bells

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• If you want to feel humor too exquisite and subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Want, Gang, Subtle

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2014). “Dusk of Dawn (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)”, p.75, Oxford University Press

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• Artists are looking for a new modernity that would be based on translation: What matters today is to translate the cultural values of cultural groups and to connect them to the world network. This “reloading process” of modernism according to the twenty-first-century issues could be called altermodernism, a movement connected to the creolisation of cultures and the fight for autonomy, but also the possibility of producing singularities in a more and more standardized world.

  Nicolas Bourriaud

  Fighting, Artist, Issues

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• Alexander von Humboldt’s wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person’s stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.

  Daniel Walker Howe

  Art, Views, World

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• The translation called good has original value as a work of art.

  Benedetto Croce

  Art, Originals, Values

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• Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

  Robert Frost

  Lost, Interpretation, Poetry Is

  Quoted in Louis Untermeyer, Robert Frost: A Backward Look (1964)

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• The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition.

  David Bellos

  Practice, Names, Two

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• Liberty does not consist in mere declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Men, Rights, President

  Woodrow Wilson (2012). “President Wilson's Addresses”, p.108, tredition

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• Regarding R. H. Blyth: For translations, the best books are still those by R. H. Blyth. . . .

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Book, Stills

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• I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.

  Walt Whitman

  Death, Spiritual, Vehement

  Walt Whitman (1872). “Leaves of Grass”, p.382

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• The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

  Guillermo del Toro

  Ideas, Diaries, Brilliant

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• Regarding R. H. Blyth: The first book in English based on the saijiki is R. H. Blyth's Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952. After the first, background volume, the remaining three consist of a collection of Japanese haiku with translations, all organized by season, and within the seasons by traditional categories and about three hundred seasonal topics.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Book, Topics, Firsts

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• General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time.

  Lawrence Venuti

  Book, Editors, Discipline

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• Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second.

  Lawrence Venuti

  Play, Favors, Lasts

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• All nonfiction writers, whether they like it or not, are translators. The translator is the perfect journalist. The best journalism endeavors to convey an essential idea or story to an audience that knows very little about it, and that requires translation. To do this successfully, the writer must filter the idea through the prism of his eye, and his mind, and his writing style.

  Ilan Stavans

  Writing, Eye, Ideas

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• Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.

  Richard Howard

  Paraphrase

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• Cómo se acuerda con los pájaros la traducción de sus idiomas?

  Pablo Neruda

  Bird, Language

  "The book of questions".

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• Regarding R. H. Blyth: Blyth's four volume Haiku became especially popular at this time [1950's] because his translations were based on the assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. Not surprisingly, his books attracted the attention of the Beat school, most notably writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, all of whom had a prior interest in Zen.

  Reginald Horace Blyth

  Book, School, Expression

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• Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

  Gilbert Murray

  Style, Normal, Aim

  Aristotle, Gilbert Murray (1920). “On the Art of Poetry”, p.6, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

  Samuel Johnson

  Language, Trouble, Poet

  James Boswell, Samuel Johnson (1859). “The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides”, p.62

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• Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

  Harry Mathews

  Writing, Speech, Transformation

  Harry Mathews (2002). “The Human Country: New and Collected Stories”

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• If you are interested in Taoism, I would suggest that you read the Way of Life by Lao Tsu, the founder of Taoism. I personally prefer the Witter Brynner translation.

  Frederick Lenz

  Taoism, Laos, Way

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• A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)

  Peter Newmark

  Satisfied, Translators

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