Quotes by Translators - Page 9

The world, whatever we might think about it terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering—of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants are free of suffering; whatever we might think about its spaces pierced by the radiation of stars, stars around which we now have begun to discover planets, already dead? still dead?—we don’t know; whatever we might think about this immense theater, to which we may have a ticket, but it is valid for a ridiculously brief time, limited by two decisive dates; whatever else we might think about this world—it is amazing.
Wisława Szymborska
There are many ways to say I love you in this cold, dark, silent universe, as many as the twinkling stars.
Ken Liu
What worlds are there herein? I’ll tell you. In these seas of fragrant waters, numerous as atoms in unspeakably many buddha-fields, rest an equal number of world systems. Each world system also contains an equal number of worlds. Those world systems in the ocean of worlds have various resting places, various shapes and forms, various substances and essences, various locations, various entryways, various adornments, various boundaries, various alignments, various similarities, and various powers of maintenance.
Thomas Cleary
The preaching of God's word is hateful and contrary unto them. Why? For it is impossible to preach Christ, except thou preach against antichrist; that is to say, them which with their false doctrine and violence of sword enforce to quench the true doctrine of Christ.
William Tyndale
Silence is the best language to speak in when you have lots of things to say.
Suman Pokhrel
I'd like to turn the silence right up, but how do you do that?
Valérie Zenatti
When we are young the noise of general conversation seems much the most fun. When we grow up we discover the possibilities of the tete-a-tete. In maturity the monologue habit sets is. But now at last there is the chance to investigate the rich depth of the silence when the monologue is suspended.
Nanamoli Thera
Small, red, and upright he waited,gripping his new bookbag tightin one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,while the first snows of winterfloated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silencedall trace of the world.
Anne Carson
Why don't you like the foods I like?" he asks sometimes. "Why don't you like the foods I make?" I answer.
Lydia Davis
I've swallowed fish-eyes wholelike an endoscope.I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin. Felt like a shark eating another shark,inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.
Yann Rousselot
How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck
Patrick O'Brian
If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed,counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly willgive him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.
Lin Yutang
What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang
A Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, once said: ‘Dijiste media verdad. Dirán que mientes dos veces si dices la otra mitad.’”“Translated means…”“You told a half-truth. They’ll say you lie twice when you tell the other half.
Olga Núñez Miret
Well...letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it in.
Charles Martin
To mock something is pure ignorance. Intelligent people even open themselves to things that they don't understand. […] When an ignorant praises something, it won't probably be something profound. Surely it can't be the Principle that guides us.
Alfonso Colodrón
Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts.
Nanamoli Thera
It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.
Nanamoli Thera
Ignorance screens the truth. It is on that screen that people paint pictures and write underneath their labels "god" and "not-god" and "theism.' and "atheism" .
Nanamoli Thera
It is our eyes that blind us and our ears that deafen us.
Nanamoli Thera
Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.
Thomas de Quincey
The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.
Enrique de Hériz
What you remember saves you.
W.S. Merwin
He traced a line in the dirt with his toe. ‘This is a battlefield. Has been since Cain killed Abel. And don’t let it get complicated. Gray it ain’t. It’s black and white. Good versus evil. You might as well choose sides right now.
Charles Martin
Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.
Dorothy L. Sayers
You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.
Paul Bowles
A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.
Anne Carson
To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.
Fernando Pessoa
Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...And suddenly, from behind me, I hear the metaphysically abrupt arrival of the office boy. I feel like I could kill him for barging in on what I wasn't thinking. I turn around and look at him with a silence full of hatred, tense with latent homicide, my mind already hearing the voice he'll use to tell me something or other. He smiles from the other side of the room and says 'Good afternoon' in a loud voice. I hate him like the universe. My eyes are sore from imagining.
Fernando Pessoa
Comics are drawings, not photographs, and as such they present a subjective view of reality.
Frederik L. Schodt
Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.
Frederik L. Schodt
From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.
Shogo Oketani
Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.
Frederik L. Schodt
...he refused to consider the Moroccans' present culture, however decadent, an established fact, an existing thing. Instead, he seemed to believe that it was something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition, that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition.
Paul Bowles
In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
A culture finds the gods it needs.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.
Juliet Winters Carpenter
Every little thing makes a difference, whether you decide it yourself or whether it’s pure accident. So many people have had the whole course of their lives changed by something perfectly simple like, let’s say, crossing the street at one point instead of another.”“Yes, yes, yes, I know,” Stenham said with exaggerated weariness. “As far as I’m concerned that’s just as boring, and a lot more false, by the way. The point I’m trying to make is that he loves his world of Koranic law because it’s his, and at the same time he hates it because his intuition tells him it’s at the end of its rope. He can’t expect anything more from it. And our world, he hates that too, just on general principles, and yet it’s his only hope, the only way out—if there is one for him personally, which I doubt.
Paul Bowles
I knew that Sundays in England aren't just ordinary dull Sundays, the same the world over, which demand that one simply tiptoe through without disturbing them or paying them the least attention, they are vaster and slower and more burdensome than anywhere else I know.
Javier Marías
They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.
Paul Celan
Going around in life using German, which Margaret had learned only a few years before, was like walking around in high heels--although it drove up the aesthetic rush of going out on the town, it was dreadfully uncomfortable after a while, and there were certain places you couldn't go
Ida Hattemer-Higgins
Of the 193 recognized countries in the world, only politically isolated North Korea is considered monolingual.
Nataly Kelly
To deny access to translation and interpreting services oppresses human rights and violates laws.
Nataly Kelly
As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
Nataly Kelly
Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone.
Nataly Kelly
In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.
Nataly Kelly
Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?
Nataly Kelly
Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator.
Nataly Kelly
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip Mandelstam
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
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
You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.
Bänoo Zan
This little boy playing next to me is an intellectual mass of cells - better yet, he's a clockwork of subatomic movements, a strange electrical conglomeration of millions of solar systems in minature. [58, Zenith trans.]
Fernando Pessoa
Language is the only homeland.
Czesław Miłosz
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
Wisława Szymborska
The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt.
Fernando Pessoa