Charlotte

“She retrieved the beads she had dropped from under the sewing tables, and strung them again. She made and painted more beads, added the slimerod cores she had dried, the seed pods of this plant, tufts of long hair from cows’ tails caught in brush… she wasn’t sure what she was making, only that she liked the patterns of chunky things and thin ones, color and texture and line. When she put the construction on her body, she realized it needed a bit more here — another length of beads — and something else there to balance the weight and keep it from slipping off her shoulders. She looked in the mirror. Odd how seldom she’d done that, not since before the other landing. She had not wanted to see her expression; she had been afraid that she might frighten herself. But now the figure in the mirror hardly looked human. She stared. She felt the same — mostly the same — and in the mirror her own face scowled at her, the familiar scowl with which she had always greeted her mirror-self. Her eyebrows were thinner and whiter; her white hair a tousled bush of silver. But the inner self that had been so intent on stringing beads and feathers and wool and cows’ hair and seedpods, that had been so sure where to lace this string to that, and how to hang the tassels — that self had not imagined how she would look in anything but the old drab workshirts and skirts and bonnets of earlier years.
Indecent, the old voice said. Amazing, the new voice said, with approval. Her body was old, wrinkled, sagging, splotched with the wear-marks of nearly eighty years… but hanging on it in weblike patterns were the brilliant colors and textures of her creation.”
― Elizabeth Moon, Remnant Population

“On n’y échappe pas : il faut déconstruire tout ce qui fait la beauté de cette langue, les mots, leurs sonorités si anciennes, les références littéraires, les subtilités de l’écriture, l’étymologie et la part d’histoire singulière qu’elle contient. La langue de la traduction est toujours défaillante. Je ne peux rien contre la perte irrémédiable de ce qui me touche le plus. [...]

Il y a bien longtemps – aussi loin que mes souvenirs remontent – j’ai trouvé refuge dans la lecture et dans la littérature. Puis ce fut dans l’entre-deux de la traduction, ce pont flottant au milieu des brumes [...]. Je rêve encore à Babel, non comme un monde totalitaire où nous serions tous sommés de ressentir la même chose et de l’exprimer de manière identique, mais comme une unité profonde et sous-jacente courant sous des mots différents, sous des regards fragmentés qui mettent en lumière différents aspects du réel.”
― Corinne Atlan, Le Pont flottant des rêves