Nahashon > Nahashon's Quotes

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“All religions are based on obsolete terminology.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“A satisfactory translation is not always possible, but a good translator is never satisfied with it. It can usually be improved. (Newmark)”
― Peter Newmark, Manual de traducción (Linguistica / Linguistic)

“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, Fugitive Pieces

“So many people consider their work a daily punishment. Whereas I love my work as a translator. Translation is a journey over a sea from one shore to the other. Sometimes I think of myself as a smuggler: I cross the frontier of language with my booty of words, ideas, images, and metaphors.”
― Amara Lakhous, Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

“In antiquity , for instance, one of the dominant images of the translators was that of a builder: his (usually it was him, not her) task was to carefully demolish a building, a structure (the source text), carry the bricks somewhere else (into the target culture), and construct a new building - with the same bricks.”
― Andrew Chesterman, Can Theory Help Translators?

“The original language of Christianity is translation.”
― Lamin Sanneh

“I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.”
― Harold Bloom

“There is no such thing as a perfect, ideal, or 'correct' translation. A translator is always trying to extend his knowledge and improve his means of expression; he is always pursuing facts and words.”
― Peter Newmark, Manual de traducción (Linguistica / Linguistic)

“Translation is that which transforms everything so that nothing changes.”
― Günter Grass

“There can never be an absolutely final translation.”
― Robert M. Grant

“We know there are colours in the spectrum untranslatable to our eyes; sounds beyond the range of our hearing; sensations beyond the tolerance of taste or touch. What else is there that we might be missing? Could it be that we, ourselves, only ever really experience the mere gist of our own lives?

(attrib: F.L. Vanderson)”
― Mort W. Lumsden, Citations: A Brief Anthology

“I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Sometimes words are just a crude translation of love.”
― Saleem Sharma

“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

“Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.”
― Nataly Kelly

“The first rule of translation: make sure you know at least one of the bloody languages!”
― Faiz Ahmed Faiz

“All explicit knowledge is translated knowledge, and all translation is imperfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.”
― Craig Ferguson, Between the Bridge and the River

“Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Translation is the art of failure.”
― Umberto Eco

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”
― Rumi

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim