Translations Quotes - Page 2

• It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.

  Brian Friel

  Past, Shapes, Facts

  Brian Friel, Paul Delaney (2000). “Brian Friel in conversation”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.

  Voltaire

  Giving, Letters, Woe

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• I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

  Joan Larkin

  Jobs, Thinking, People

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. October 25, 2013.

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• As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

  Boris Pasternak

  Writing, Copying, Might

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• Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

  Havelock Ellis

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  The Dance of Life ch. 2 (1923)

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• Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence.

  George Steiner

  Silence, Borders, World

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• A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

  Ezra Pound

  Age, Literature, Language

  John Patrick Sullivan, Ezra Pound, Sextus Propertius (1964). “Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: a study in creative translation”

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• ...trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn’t suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren’t always what I had in mind, they aren’t my punishment either. They’re rewards, let’s say for the patience of a seed.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Rain, Butterfly, Punishment

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• Some stories I write in Swedish, some in English. Short stories I've almost exclusively written in English lately, mostly because there's such a small market for them in Sweden and it doesn't really pay either. So, the translation goes both ways. What also factors in is that I have a different voice in English, which means that a straight translation wouldn't be the same as if I'd written it in English originally.

  Karin Tidbeck

  Writing, Mean, Voice

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

  Maya Angelou

  Beautiful, Language, Rhythm

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• The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Ideas, Doctrine

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• Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  Art, World, Materials

  "A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing". Book by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1975.

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• So what Jesus taught must be understood from the deepest level and that is one of the best sayings to show that he was talking in that way. In the book Revelations from Christ, I found out something that Yogananda said. That Jesus had said son of men and son of God, and people often misunderstand so sometimes the translations themselves are wrong for that reason. So when he said son of man he meant his human body and personality. When he said son of God, he meant the infinite Christ consciousness with which he'd obtained oneness.

  Goswami Kriyananda

  Jesus, Book, Son

  Source: www.lotusguide.com

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• If we are perplexed by an apparent contradiction in Scripture, it is not allowable to say, 'The author of this book is mistaken'; but either the manuscript is faulty, or the translation is wrong, or you have not understood.

  Saint Augustine

  Book, Scripture, Contradiction

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• The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room... The whole point of dancing is the dance.

  Alan Watts

  Rain, Dancing, Sound

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• Alternate translation: Come brethren, if you have a mind to be ingrafted in the vine, It is a pity to see you lopped off in this manner From the stock. Reckon up the prelates in the very see of Peter; And in that order of fathers see which has succeeded which. This is the rock over which the proud gates of hell prevail not.

  Saint Augustine

  Father, Order, Rocks

  "Our Church, Her Children and Institutions", Volume 1, by Henry Coyle, Angel Guardian Press, Boston, (p. 98), 1908.

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• Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

  Voltaire

  Faults, Language, Increase

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• Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. We speak to people who have vanished and, when they answer us, they do the same. Naturally, the information in these speeches is garbled in the translation.

  Karen Joy Fowler

  Mother, Children, Loss

  Karen Joy Fowler (2015). “Black Glass: Short Fictions”, p.42, Penguin

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• It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Book, Language, Worst

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• Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist" from, "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense".

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Lying, Army, Order

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• The journey of a thousand miles
  starts from beneath your feet.
  
  NOTE: Other translations exist, such as:Great trees grow from the smallest shoots;a terraced garden, from a pile of earth,and a journey of a thousand milesbegins by taking the initial step.

  Laozi

  Journey, Garden, Feet

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• Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis. The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand. (it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation...)

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Dream, Sleep, Sound

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• It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

  Alberto Manguel

  Reading, Firsts, Innocence

  "A History of Reading". Book by Alberto Manguel, 1996.

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• It's impossible to make a movie out of 'Naked Lunch.' A literal translation just wouldn't work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world.

  David Cronenberg

  Country, Countries Of The World, Lunch

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• The original language of Christianity is translation.

  Lamin Sanneh

  Language, Christianity, Originals

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