7 Quotes by Eliot Weinberger

Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones - both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never, tread, and often may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of Western language.

Translation is not appropriation, as is sometimes claimed; it is a form of listening that then changes how you speak.

Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise than what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.

William Carlos Williams, late in his long life, had a dream: He saw an enormous spiral staircase in empty space, and his father slowly descending toward him. When he reached the bottom, his father walked over, looked him in the eye and said: “You know those poems you’re writing? They’re no good.”

Japan: A stranger hands you a stone and asks you to hold it. Puzzled, you take it. The stone grows. And grows until you are crushed.

Young girls would paint themselves like parakeets. Bothersome children are like parakeets. If you dream a parakeet is lying in an oven you may be certain that soon you will die. The shells of hatched parakeets turn into maggots, which turn into lizards, which creep down the throats of sleeping people.

Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.