237 Quotes About Translation

And now that I think back, I realize the real gap between us lay in the fact that I, who was so proud of coming from the swift-winged world of science, was laughing at an old world where it was possible seriously to believe that men die young of the bad habit of failing to go out on a dangerous river to gaze at the earth when it turns overnight into silver.

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There is tension in official translation between being adequate to professional quality standards and being acceptable to the public authorities, just as there is tension between the faithfulness and easy identification on the one hand, and style and plausibility on the other.

Translation is not an operation of comparing languages; it is a communicative and creative act.

Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.

Every translator’s origin story seems to involve a measure of serendipity, and mine is no exception.

I should mention is that, because I don’t live off my translation work, I have the luxury of taking on only those projects that appeal to me - or, more accurately, projects that I connect with, to which I feel I can do justice. If I don’t feel I can give a text my best effort or that I can put myself in the skin of the writing, then my impulse is to turn it down. It wouldn’t be fair to the book, the author, or the reader for me to translate it under those conditions.

It is the nature of the human mind to convey its own character to whatever substance it conveys, whether it convey metaphysical impressions from itself to another mind, or literary compositions from one to another language.

A mirror may be held in different lights by different hands; and, according to the position of those hands, will the light fall.