Quotes by Translators - Page 21

How you die out in me:down to the lastworn-out knot of breathyou're there, with a splinter of life.
Paul Celan
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
Richard Wilbur
So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words
W.S. Merwin
When wounds are healed by love,The scars are beautiful.
David Bowles
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.
Wisława Szymborska
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
W.S. Merwin
Don't sign your namebetween worlds,surmountthe manifold of meanings,trust the tearstain,learn to live.
Paul Celan
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
Paul Celan
A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important.
Wisława Szymborska
I offer you what I have myPoverty
W.S. Merwin
I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book.
Kenneth Rexroth
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson
We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.
Fernando Pessoa
No duties. I don’t have to be profound.I don’t have to be artistically perfect.Or sublime. Or edifying.I just wander. I say: ‘You were running,That’s fine. It was the thing to do.’And now the music of the worlds transforms me.My planet enters a different house.Trees and lawns become more distinct.Philosophies one after another go out.Everything is lighter yet not less odd.Sauces, wine vintages, dishes of meat.We talk a little of district fairs,Of travels in a covered wagon with a cloud of dust behind,Of how rivers once were, what the scent of calamus is.That’s better than examining one’s private dreams.And meanwhile it has arrived. It’s here, invisible.Who can guess how it got here, everywhere.Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.Buena notte. Ciao. Farewell.
Czesław Miłosz
It is sweet to think I was a companion in an expedition that never ends
Czesław Miłosz
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Julio Cortázar
My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W.S. Merwin
part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
The night has a thousand eyes,And the day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.
Francis William Bourdillon
Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
Fernando Pessoa
You see how I tryTo reach with wordsWhat matters mostAnd how I fail.
Czesław Miłosz
The purpose of poetry is to remind ushow difficult it is to remain just one person,for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will.
Czesław Miłosz
My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.
Osip Mandelstam
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
Julio Cortázar
In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.
Asti Hustvedt
...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it, if our own will is made in its semblance. It may be, rather, that nothing is ever unmixed and the thirst for totality is never quenched, perhaps because it is a false yearning. Nothing is whole or of a single piece, everything is fractured and evenomed, veins of peace run through the body of war and hatred insinuates itself into love and compassion, there is truce amid the quagmire of bullets and a bullet amid the revelries, nothing can bear to be unique or prevail or be dominant and everything needs fissures and cracks, needs it negation at the same time as its existence. And nothing is known with certainty and everything is told figuratively.
Javier Marías
The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Oh dire, dreadful death, you drag your heels.Why dawdle and draw back? You drown my heart.
Simon Armitage
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative.And when Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find new ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average legth of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15, 508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as Oceania, India or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
Patrik Ouředník
Thank God,my name isn’t in the list of thosewho died or werekilled yesterday!
Suman Pokhrel
Now every mortal has painand sweat is constant,but if there is anything dearer than being alive,it's dark to me.We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth--we call it life. We know no other.The underworld's a blankand all the rest just fantasy.
Anne Carson
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
Dorothy L. Sayers
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Wisława Szymborska
Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.
Julio Cortázar
In the middle of life, death comesto take your measurements. The visitis forgotten and life goes on. But the suitis being sewn on the sly.
Tomas Tranströmer
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
Alberto Manguel
A garden is made of hope.
W.S. Merwin
All we know, Midnight. The best of all we know. For Chestry Valley and its master we loved. For Nana. For Sugarloaf and Brimstone Farm. For Pop and Mom and Tom. For the foals to come. For yesterday and for all tomorrows, we dance the best we know. For good-by.
Kate Seredy
But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything.
Sam Taylor
You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn’t the kind you were thinking of.” He laughed to himself. “Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes.
Charles Martin
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
Anne Carson
Tell me what’s the differencebetween hope and waitingbecause my heart doesn’t knowIt constantly cuts itself on the glass of waitingIt constantly gets lost in the fog of hope
Anna Kamieńska
In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.
Marsilio Ficino
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
Fernando Pessoa
As readers, we are seldom interested in the fine sentiments of a lesson learnt; we seldom care about the good manners of morals. Repentance puts an end to conversation; forgiveness becomes the stuff of moralistic tracts. Revenge - bloodthirsty, justice-hungry revenge - is the very essence of romance, lying at the heart of much of the best fiction.
Alberto Manguel
Maybe I'm deceiving myself. Perhaps I don't know him as well as I'd like to imagine. What does a person so willing to utterly remake himself hold inside his heart? Can I trust such a man? What motivates him?In an instant she knew, and she felt a bit of relief.Love. Love was what drove him.
David Bowles
I want to be part of your story. I want your story to rearrange the symbols in my mind. I want your voice to be my voice.
David Bowles
Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.
Dorothy L. Sayers
At some point in the night she had a dream. Or it was possible that she was partially awake, and was only remembering a dream? She was alone among the rocks on a dark coast beside the sea. The water surged upward and fell back languidly, and in the distance she heard surf breaking slowly on a sandy shore. It was comforting to be this close to the surface of the ocean and gaze at the intimate nocturnal details of its swelling and ebbing. And as she listened to the faraway breakers rolling up onto the beach, she became aware of another sound entwined with the intermittent crash of waves: a vast horizontal whisper across the bossom of the sea, carrying an ever-repeated phrase, regular as a lighthouse flashing: Dawn will be breaking soon. She listened a long time: again and again the scarcely audible words were whispered across the moving water. A great weight was being lifted slowly from her; little by little her happiness became more complete, and she awoke. Then she lay for a few minutes marveling the dream, and once again fell asleep.
Paul Bowles
Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
Richard Francis Burton
Come here, let me share a bit of wisdom with you.Have you given much thought to our mortal condition?Probably not. Why would you? Well, listen.There's no one alivewho can say if he will be tomorrow.Our fate moves invisibly! A mystery.No one can teach it, no one can grasp it.Accept this! Cheer up! Have a drink!You can let the rest go. Am I making sense?I think so. How about a drink.Put on a garland. I'm surethe happy splash of wine will cure your mood.We're all mortal you know. Think mortal.Because my theory is, there's no such thing as life,
Anne Carson
If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.
Lin Yutang
Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.
Claire Holden Rothman