QUOTES ON TRANSLATION
The translator is the secret master of the difference of languages, a difference he is not out to abolish, but rather one he puts to use as he brings violent or subtle changes to bear on his own language, thus awakening within it the presence of that which is at origin different in the original.
Maurice Blanchot
A work is not ready for or worthy of translation unless it harbors this difference within itself in some available fashion, whether it be because it originally gestures toward some other language, or because it gathers within itself in some privileged manner those possibilities of being different from itself or foreign to itself which every living language possesses.
Maurice Blanchot
Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures – particularly similar messages and formal techniques – but it does so only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of cultural order, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures.
Lawrence Venuti
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
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Robert Frost
The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry.
Leonardo Sciascia
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker
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
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
Milan Kundera
Many critics, no defenders,
translators have but two regrets:
when we hit, no one remembers,
when we miss, no one forgets.
Anonymous
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
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Anthony Burgess
Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Translation quality assessment proceeds according to the lordly, completely unexplained, whimsy of “It doesn’t sound right”.
Peter Fawcett
Translators live off the differences between languages, all the while working toward eliminating them.
Edmond Cary
Translators have to prove to themselves as to others that they are in control of what they do; that they do not just translate well because they have a “flair” for translation, but rather because, like other professionals, they have made a conscious effort to understand various aspects of their work.
Mona Baker
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information–hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. Walter Benjamin
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Jorge Luis Borges
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 presents not merely a paradigm but the utmost case of engaged literary interpretation
John Felstiner
The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.
Hans Georg Gadamer
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
Translators: sellers of old mended shoes and boots, between cobblers and shoemakers.
Francis Grose
Translator, traitor.
Italian Proverb
All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.
Benjamin Jowett
To talk about translation is rather like talking about the glass in front of a picture when it is the picture itself that engrosses our attention
J. Lehmann
Europe owes its civilization to translators.
Kelly Louis Western
Translations are one of the vital necessities of our time.
F.C. Lucas
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.
Good Harry Mathews
It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.
Friedrich Nietzsche
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.
Ezra Pound
A translation can never equal the original; it can approach it, and its quality can only be judged as to accuracy by how close it gets.
Gregory Rabassa
A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print
Gregory Rabassa
I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle.
Gregory Rabassa
Translation is a disturbing craft because there is precious little certainty about what we are doing, which makes it so difficult in this age of fervent belief and ideology, this age or greed and screed.
Gregory Rabassa
The translator's task is much harder than that of the original author.
Theodore Savory
It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?
Voltaire
Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.
Voltaire
The best translators have been those writers who have composed original works of the same species.
Woodhouselee
It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.
Virginia Woolf
