Translations Quotes - Page 12

• I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.

  Christian Wiman

  Thinking, Smell, Tests

  Source: bigthink.com

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• In fact, many of the quotes in my books are quotes which were translated from English and that I read already translated into Spanish. I'm not really concerned with what the original version in English was, because the important thing for me is that I received them already translated, and they've influenced my original worldview as translations, not as original quotations.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Book, Important, Worldview

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• So the aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish under-represented writing, which is an intersection of original language, style, content, and often its author's gender. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous.

  Deborah Smith

  Art, Writing, Style

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Alongside Han Kang, there's only one other author I've chosen to translate so far - Bae Suah. Her work is radical both stylistically and politically, influenced by her own translation practice (she's translated the likes of Kafka, Pessoa, and Sadeq Hedayat into Korean). Her language is simply extraordinary.

  Deborah Smith

  Practice, Likes, Bae

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Whenever I visit Korea she [Kang] buys me lunch and takes me to a gallery. As if all this wasn't enough, she has incredible respect for translation as a creative, artistic practice - she insists that each English version is 'our book', offered to share her fees with me when she found out I wasn't getting paid for translating her publicity stuff, always asks the editor to credit me, and does so herself whenever she's interviewed. Too good to be true.

  Deborah Smith

  Book, Korea, Practice

  Source: thequietus.com

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• I teach Korean translation at the British Centre for Literary Translation summer school, so I see an emerging generation too, who are around my age. I'm hoping to find time to mentor, and to help emerging translators to a first contract through Tilted Axis.

  Deborah Smith

  Summer, School, Axes

  Source: thequietus.com

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• All of which suggested literary translation, and Korean seemed a good bet - barely anything available in English, yet it was a modern, developed country, so the work had to be out there, plus the rarity would make it both easier to secure a student grant and more of a niche when it came to work.

  Deborah Smith

  Country, Students, Korean

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Teaching translation is more of an editing job. You act as editor. But you can have fun with it.

  Gregory Rabassa

  Jobs, Fun, Teaching

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If men were able to be convinced that art is a precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artist? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigation charts? I am curious to know what would happem if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Art, Blow, Technology

  Marshall McLuhan (1964). “Understanding media: the extensions of man”

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• How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, though the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by signs. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Place a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." A beck of the hand is better than, "Come here." No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.

  Herbert Spencer

  Eye, Simple, Doors

  Herbert Spencer (1871). “Essays: Moral, Political and Aesthetic”, p.11

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• There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.

  Walter Benjamin

  Philosophy, Muse

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• In every art we are always obliged to return to the accepted means of expression, the conventional language of the art. What is a black-and-white drawing but a convention to which the beholder has become so accustomed that with his mind's eye he sees a complete equivalent in the translation from nature?

  Eugene Delacroix

  Art, Mean, Eye

  "Journal of Delacroix". Book by Hubert Wellington, translated by Lucy Norton, p.334, 1980.

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• Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.

  D.T. Suzuki

  Plato, Latin, Buddhism

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• Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.

  Vernor Vinge

  Language, Natural, Program

  Vernor Vinge (2010). “Zones of Thought: A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky”, p.257, Hachette UK

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• Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.

  Arshile Gorky

  Art, Moving, Movement

  Arshile Gorky, Matthew Spender (2009). “Arshile Gorky: goats on the roof : a life in letters and documents”

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• Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.

  Terence McKenna

  Hero, Heart, Together

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

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• The subtle differences in language and humor that get lost in translation, for example, make it almost impossible for big companies to do something that will appeal at home and abroad.

  Larry Gelbart

  Home, Differences, Example

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Gaiaguys are free to think for themselves, and since their translations of our texts - even if these are of a preliminary nature - are sought for by many people, we see no reason for withdrawing our permission.

  Billy Meier

  Thinking, People, Reason

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• The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Writing, Men, Hands

  Woodrow Wilson, Ronald J. Pestritto (2005). “Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings”, p.211, Lexington Books

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• It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christ, Virtue, Easy

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Three Essays on Religion”, p.255, New York : H. Holt

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• When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.

  Karel Appel

  Ocean, Book, Space

  "Karel Appel - the complete sculptures". Book edited by Harry de Visser and Roland Hagenberg, Edition Lafayette, New York, p. 93, 'Quotes', 1990.

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• I think that the best literature has a core that you can't lock to a time or place but that can generate lots of meanings and translations.

  Karl Ove Knausgard

  Thinking, Locks, Literature

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• You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

  Robert Frost

  Mean, Littles, Lost

  "Robert Frost: A Backward Look". Book by Louis Untermeyer, January 1, 1964.

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• Pour e  crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e  crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a'   l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a'   en chacun de nous, mais a'   le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

  Marcel Proust

  Book, Writing, Essentials

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• The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years.

  Max Muller

  Country, Fate, Years

  "The Life and Letters of Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller" edited by Georgina Müller, 1902.

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