Quotes about Translation

• "Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit." Jonathan Lethem

• "Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.” Voltaire

• "Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful." Yevgeny Yevtushenko

• "Poetry is what gets lost in translation." Robert Frost

• "A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services." Edward Sapir

• "A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it." Millington Synge

• "As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings." Boris Pasternak

• "The original is unfaithful to the translation." Jorge Luis Borges

• "Translation cannot be dissociated from the notion of progress, some even maintain that a society can be measured by the translation it accepts -" Jean-Francois Joly

• "Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world." J. W. Goethe

• "If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann müssen sie Deutsch sprechen." Willy Brandt

• "By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow." Brian Ferneyhough

• "Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself." Havelock Ellis

• "For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?" Cyril Connolly

• "If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream." Rene Magritte

• "Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation." Sir.John Denham

• "The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry." Leonardo Sciascia

• "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." Marilyn Hacker

• "Translation is at best an echo." George Borrow

• "Translation is the art of failure." Umberto Eco

• "True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation." Thomas Bailey Aldrich

• "What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best." Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

• "What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is." Jonathan Miller

• "When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you." Story Musgrave

• "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." Gilbert Murray

• "God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice." John Donne

• "A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations." Ezra Pound

• "Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue." Virginia Woolf

• "Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing…. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift." Harry Mathews

• "I do not hesitate to read … all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable—any real insight or broad human sentiment." Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat … where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches." Ursula K. Le Guin

• "To translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author." Paul Goodman

• "Translating should be an enriching intellectual experience and you should end a job as a different person." Danilo Nogueira

• "Translating is writing." Marguerite Yourcenar

• "Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language." Samuel Johnson