Quotes by Translators - Page 16

Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...
Patrick O'Brian
...as long as I felt I had to take some action, I was anguished, and when I gave up all responsibility and stopped trying to do anything at all, I was relatively at peace, even though the earth meanwhile was circling so far below us and we were so high up in a defective airplane that would have trouble landing.
Lydia Davis
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
Fernando Pessoa
One in AllAll in One--If only this is realized,No more worry about your not being perfect (175)
Edward Conze
The Buddha is like space, with no inherent nature; appearing in the world to benefit the living, his features and refinements are like reflections.
Thomas Cleary
I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.
Czesław Miłosz
By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the wind comes and blows over the world,By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world.
Jane Bierhorst
In time of rain I come:I can sing among the flowers:I utter my song: my heart is glad.Water of flowers foams over the earth:My heart was intoxicated.
Jane Bierhorst
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wisława Szymborska
Literature deals with morality but does not necessarily, does not, qua literature, help you to be more moral, either by precept or example. It makes you more aware. Which is to say that it makes you more human by making life more, not less, difficult. When you become more aware, the area of moral choice is widened. You can be a better man; you can also be a worse. Literature will not determine which. It is the equivalent of neither grace nor good works.
Eric Bentley
When it was all overthe centuries startedto roll by and history was writtenby thosewith no storiesmisery turned into myth and figures of speech played catalyst to happiness
Bänoo Zan
The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.p. 30
Danilo Kiš
But it's not really Chinese, is it?'Logan was thoughtful for a moment. "I don't know. I guess you'd say it's really not if you look back thousands of years. But I don't think that way. Lots of things start out not Chinese and end up that way.
Ken Liu
History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasize. Only death is certain."To Die for One's Country is Glorious," p. 131
Danilo Kiš
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
John Ciardi
Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history's ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as the lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life.
Ken Liu
One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not history but ‘progress’ — the mechanical movement of a clock hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events.
Osip Mandelstam
I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don't you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an' suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit -- not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.
Dorothy L. Sayers
A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.
Jerome
What I’m suggesting then is that much of our response to novels may have to do with the kind of “system” or “conversation” we grew up in and within which we had to find a position and establish an identity.
Tim Parks
I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption--vain because it is endless--and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.
Lydia Davis
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.
Richard Seaver
However readers make a book theirs, the end is that book and reader become one. The world that is a book is devoured by a reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading. We are what we read. The process by which the circle is completed is not, Whitman argued, merely an intellectual one; we read intellectually on a superficial level, grasping certain meanings and conscious of certain facts, but at the same time, invisibly, unconsciously, text and reader become intertwined, creating new levels of meaning, so that every time we cause the text to yield something by ingesting it, simultaneously something else is born beneath it that we haven't yet grasped. That is why - as Whitman believed, rewriting and re-editing his poems over and over again - no reading can ever be definitive.
Alberto Manguel
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Alberto Manguel
I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.
Fernando Pessoa
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.
Alberto Manguel
I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
Julio Cortázar
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa
That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.
Dorothy L. Sayers
We should all realize that we can only talk about the bad forgeries, the ones that have been detected; the good ones are still hanging on the walls
Frank Wynne
Art is the business of selling fetishes, sacred relics once touched by genius: what the forger offers the gullible buyer is not art, it is "authenticity
Frank Wynne
Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.
Czesław Miłosz
As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.
Marie Luise Knott
I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.[from the introduction]
Dorothy Bussy
Anyone who knew the recipe of the alchemists could make gold, but only the artisans of Murano could make glass so fine, one could nearly touch one's fingers together on either side; cristallo without an imperfection or blemish, clear as the sky, with a sparkle to rival that of diamonds.
Ruth Nestvold
The local Red Cross chapter volunteered to publish his book. It came out in a deluxe, gold-embossed, Japanese-paper edition to remind the reader of human artistry, which can be a refuge from evil and a source of new, platonic stirrings. One copy was reserved for His Imperial Majesty Nicholas II. (The Tsar fairly devoured mystical works, believing that hell could be avoided by a combination of education and deceit.)"The Book of Kings and Fools," p. 136.
Danilo Kiš
Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.
Asti Hustvedt
Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.
Burton Raffel
Art is not in some far-off place.
Lydia Davis
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself. This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.
Fernando Pessoa
A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.
Ken Liu
But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.
Ken Liu
Where the mountain crosses.On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.I wandered away.
Jane Bierhorst
Misery is a scar on the soul, that if it begins in childhood, it lasts the whole lifetime. I understand that no two scars are alike, but I also ask myself; even if these scars are not alike, aren’t these things engraved on our souls signed by which we know each other?Aren’t we also alike?
Bahaa Taher
We have a soul at times.No one’s got it non-stop,for keeps.Day after day,year after yearmay pass without it.Sometimesit will settle for awhileonly in childhood’s fears and raptures.Sometimes only in astonishmentthat we are old.It rarely lends a handin uphill tasks,like moving furniture,or lifting luggage,or going miles in shoes that pinch.It usually steps outwhenever meat needs choppingor forms have to be filled.For every thousand conversationsit participates in one,if even that,since it prefers silence.Just when our body goes from ache to pain,it slips off-duty.It’s picky:it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,our hustling for a dubious advantageand creaky machinations make it sick.Joy and sorrowaren’t two different feelings for it.It attends usonly when the two are joined.We can count on itwhen we’re sure of nothingand curious about everything.Among the material objectsit favors clocks with pendulumsand mirrors, which keep on workingeven when no one is looking.It won’t say where it comes fromor when it’s taking off again,though it’s clearly expecting such questions.We need itbut apparentlyit needs usfor some reason too.
Wisława Szymborska
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
Fernando Pessoa
The soul is the weariest part of the body.
Paul Bowles
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.
Fernando Pessoa
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
Fernando Pessoa
It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The first good news for all of us, the first joyful story of our lives, is that there is a story at all, and an Author who has loved us into being.
Anthony M. Esolen
Decadence, decadence, he said to himself. They’ve lost everything and gained nothing. The French had merely daubed on the finishing touches at the end of a process which had begun five hundred years ago, at least. Their intuitive moral desires coincided with the ideals embodied in the formulas of their religion, yet they could live in accordance neither with those deepest impulses nor with the precepts of the religion, because society came in between with all the pressure of its tradition. No one could afford to be honest or generous or merciful because every one of them distrusted all the others; often they had more confidence in a Christian they were meeting for the first time than in a Moslem they had known for years.
Paul Bowles
That this is really the case was made plain to me by the questions asked me, mostly by young men, about my Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House. The action of the play involves a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian dogmas— in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation. That the Church believed Christ to be in any real sense God, or that the eternal word was supposed to be associated in any way with the word of creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time man in any real sense of the word; that the doctrine of the Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church considered pride to be sinful, or indeed took notice of any sin beyond the more disreputable sins of the flesh—all these things were looked upon as astonishing and revolutionary novelties, imported into the faith by the feverish imagination of a playwright. I protested in vain against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention, referring my inquirers to the creeds, to the gospels, and to the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play were dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma, but because of it—that, in short, the dogma was the drama. The explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt that if there were anything attractive in Christian philosophy I must have put it there myself.
Dorothy L. Sayers
It is arguable that when Humanists, "Shook off," as people say, "the trammels of religion," and discovered things of this world as objects of veneration in their own right... they began to lose the finer appreciation of even the world itself. Thus to the Christian centuries, the flesh was holy (or sacer at least in one sense or the other), and they veiled its awful majesty; to the Humanist centuries it was divine in its own right, and they exhibited it. Now it is the commonplace of the magazine cover. It has lost its numen. So too with the cult of knowledge for its own sake declining from the Revival of Learning to the Brains Trust.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Golden Rule is intolerable; if millions did to others whatever they wished others to do to them, few would be safe from molestation. The Golden Rule shows anything but moral genius, and the claim by which it is followed in the Sermon on the Mount -- 'this is the Law and the Prophets' -- makes little sense.
Walter Kaufmann
The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.
Henry Martyn