#translation

A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it. ↗

— John Millington Synge

#give #music #poem #said #translation

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is. ↗

— Jonathan Miller

#does #interesting #literature #made #makes

A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#business #countries #does #driven #enormous

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together. ↗

— Andrés Neuman

#language #love #lovers #relationships #translation

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness. ↗

— Edwin Booth

#best #books #cannot #convey #darkness

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111) ↗

— Joseph Campbell

#mythology #spiritual-experience #spirituality #translation #art

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

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

Translation is a two-edged instrument: it has the special purpose of demonstrating the learner's knowledge of the foreign language, either as a form of control or to exercise his intelligence in order to develop his competence. ↗

— Peter Newmark

#intelligence

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