237 Quotes About Translation

Beyond the offer tables and online bestseller charts are many other narratives: books that take readers away from what they know, challenge the assumptions that underpin life elsewhere and present a strikingly different world [“How Books Get Lost In translation,” Financial Times, January 15, 2015].

Turn off the light!Who?Not me,but you!

The evening sky is gold and vast.I’m soothed by April’s cool caress.You’re late. Too many years have passed, -I’m glad to see you, nonetheless.Come closer, sit here by my side,Be gentle with me, treat me kind:This old blue notebook – look inside –I wrote these poems as a child.Forgive me that I felt forsaken,That grief and angst was all I knew.Forgive me that I kept mistakingToo many other men for you.

The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!

And on the subject of naming animals, can I just say how happy I was to discover that the word yeti, literally translated, apparently means "that thing over there." ("Quick, brave Himalayan Guide - what's that thing over there?""Yeti.""I see.")

Goddess of song, teach me the storyof a hero.

It is natural for a translator to be prejudiced in favour of his adopted work. More impartial readers may not be so much struck with the beauties of this piece as I was. Yet I am not blind to my author's defects.

(...) a língua é, para o espírito de uma nação, o que o estilo é para o espírito de um indivíduo. Mas o domínio perfeito de uma língua só ocorre quando uma pessoa é capaz de traduzir não os livros, por exemplo, mas a si própria; desse modo, sem sofrer nenhuma perda de sua individualidade, ela consegue se comunicar imediatamente na outra língua, agradando tanto aos estrangeiros quanto aos falantes nativos.

The storm that batters the magnolia’simpermeable leaves, the long-drawn drum rollof Martian thunder with its hail ... lighting that makes stark-white the trees, the walls, suspending them –interminable instant – marbled manna and cataclysm –