#translation

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle. ↗

— Gilbert Murray

#aristotle #being #closely #english #equivalent

But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you. That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig. ↗

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

#imagination

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

Id Faciam What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds the nail that now is driven into itself, why. ↗

— Catullus

#love

[...] it is safer to wander without a guide through an unmapped country than to trust completely a map traced by men who came only as tourists and often with biased judgement. ↗

— Marie-Louise Sjoestedt

#scholarship #translation #men

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

I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow?
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#books #cats #homonyms #meow #translate

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

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned. ↗

— Jung Chang

#book #china #chinese #copies #gone