Translations Quotes

• Through the act of translation we break out of linguistic confinement and reach many other communities.

  Ngugi wa Thiong'o

  Community, Break Out, Confinement

  Source: www.alternet.org

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• Translation is the art of failure.

  Umberto Eco

  Art

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• Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations.

  Walter Benjamin

  Information, Language, Hallmark

  Walter Benjamin (1968). “Illuminations”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

  Anthony Burgess

  Design, Culture, Matter

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• Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko

  Beautiful, Faithful, Ifs

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• Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  World, May, Concern

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• Translators are like ninjas. If you notice them, they’re no good.

  Etgar Keret

  Funny, Ninja, Translate

  Speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival,

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• If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

  Rene Magritte

  Dream, Art, Waking Life

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• Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

  Leonard Cohen

  Prayer, Children, Men

  Leonard Cohen (2011). “Beautiful Losers”, p.78, Vintage

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• The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.

  Leonardo Sciascia

  Sides, Language, Said

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• True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich

  Art, Generosity, Giving

  Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1903). “Ponkapog papers, A sea turn, and other papers”

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• The original is unfaithful to the translation.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Originality, Unfaithful, Translate

  Sobre el "Vathek"de William Beckford (1943) in Obras Completas (1974) p. 730

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• I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Real, Book, Language

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1971). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and solitude”, p.103, Harvard University Press

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• I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.

  Agustin Fernandez Mallo

  Believe, I Believe

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

  John Lennon

  Inspirational, God, Spiritual

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• The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

  Ellsworth Kelly

  Art, Vision, World

  Madeleine Grynsztejn, Ellsworth Kelly, Julian Myers, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002). “Ellsworth Kelly in San Francisco”, p.9, Univ of California Press

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• Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

  Jonathan Lethem

  Writing, Kind, Fantastic

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• Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.

  Lydia Davis

  Ideas, People, Unfaithful

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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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• Translation is at best an echo.

  George Henry Borrow

  Echoes, Language

  George Henry Borrow (1851). “Lavengro: The Scholar--the Gypsy--the Priest”, p.151

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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