meredith brown

“But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Translation involves a spatial dimension - a literal transportation of texts across conquered territory, words delivered likes spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tea-rooms of today’s Britain.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.” Sunja”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko