Melanie

“Maybe the moon is beautiful only because it is far.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“We feel our identities like gravity: They anchor us. But our identities are not the sum total of all we are, or all we can be...as soon as I let those identities calcify in me, I limit my connection to others: I stop growing. I am learning how to dance between the gravity of my identity and the stars, our truest ancestral home.”
― Valerie Kaur

“But there are no men here,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “so how can it be improper? Have you noticed,” she inquired of Mrs. Fisher, who endeavoured to pretend she did not hear, “How difficult it is to be improper without men?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Enchanted April

“Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.”
― Edith Grossman