#translation

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God. ↗

— Orson Welles

#film #god #movies #praying #presentation

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow. ↗

— Brian Ferneyhough

#instructions #like #many #poems #read

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. ↗

— Horace Walpole

#beauty

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

#buddha #call #god #gone #i

The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will. ↗

— Recep Tayyip Erdogan

#democracy #european #european union #help #into

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living. ↗

— Edith Grossman Why Translation Matters

#literature-in-translation #imagination

Let not the rash marble risk garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence, in many words recalling name, renown, events, birthplace. All those glass jewels are best left in the dark. Let not the marble say what men do not. The essentials of the dead man's life-- the trembling hope, the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight-- will abide forever. Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue when it is the lives of others that will make that happen, as you yourself are the mirror and image of those who did not live as long as you and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#inscription-on-any-tomb #life #mortality #philosophy #self

Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications. ↗

— Anne Michaels

#life

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

— Thomas Bailey Aldrich

#gives #seldom #selects #translation #true

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. ↗

— Paul Auster

#bread #contemporary #earn #food #french