Translation Quotes - page 2

I'm not a collector. I don't keep letters, or books, or souvenirs. But I do keep one copy of each translation of my books into a foreign language. Have you ever seen a murder story printed in Singhalese? Wow! (Rex Stout)
Consider the Koran... this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
Every language is a world. Without translation, we would inhabit parishes bordering on silence. View quote
George Steiner
It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth. View quote
Alberto Manguel
The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years. View quote
Max Müller
There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation. View quote
Walter Benjamin
I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation. View quote
Walt Whitman
All language is but a poor translation. View quote
Franz Kafka
The original is unfaithful to the translation. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity. View quote
Albert Einstein
When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die. (Randall Jarrell)
Music is the voice of all sorrow, all joy. It needs no translation. View quote
Helen Exley
I write in a slangy colloquial speech that has not been common in the Israeli tradition of writing, and that is one of the things that gets lost a little in translation. View quote
Etgar Keret
Translation is an act of recreation. View quote
Ken Liu
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. View quote
Gilbert Murray
Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit. View quote
Jonathan Lethem
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically. View quote
Marilyn Hacker
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. View quote
Robert Morgan
Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. View quote
Robert Morgan
And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11. (Sibel Edmonds)
I'm interested in the murky areas where there are no clear answers - or sometimes multiple answers. It's here that I try to imagine patterns or codes to make sense of the unknowns that keep us up at night. I'm also interested in the invisible space between people in communication; the space guided by translation and misinterpretation. View quote
Taryn Simon
The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested. View quote
Utada Hikaru
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation. View quote
Utada Hikaru
Just as Hegel is said to have understood his philosophy for the first time when he read its French translation, Vilfredo Pareto could have learned what it was he meant exactly to say when he read Bergson's 1938 classic. View quote
Paul Samuelson