Selected translation quotes

1. Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

2. These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

3. Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

4. Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate, That few but such as cannot write, translate.

5. Nor ought a genius less than his that writ Attempt translation.

6. I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne. And they're all dead...

7. After all I find in my work an echo of what struck me. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand. In my shorthand there may be words that cannot be deciphered. There may be mistakes or gaps, but there is something in it of what wood or beech or figure has told me, and it is not a tame or conventional language, that proceeds not from nature itself but from a studied manner or a system.

8. There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

9. It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German Folk should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo jumbo: As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully. It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed offers an undeniably broad basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological exposition devoid of all honest depth.

10. This was for years the standard translation of Aristotle. It was reprinted in Great Books of the Western World (1952).

11. I signaled to my host to try to have the philosophers expound on some aspect of their knowledge. As a good friend he immediately rose to the occasion. I won't go into the conversation that accompanied his request, and the difference between the comic and the serious was too slight to translate.

12. There is no Chinese word for 'Fun Fur'.

13. 3, (20 October 1917); as published in The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954); also in Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (1954); variant translations use 'cardinal sins' instead of 'main human sins' and 'laziness' instead of 'indolence'.

14. Joel Barlow, who had served as Washington's chaplain, and was also a good friend of Paine and Jefferson was the representative in charge of the translation.

15. Oft in one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet never did I breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken.

16. Translated: 'to the stars through difficulties'.

17. El original es infiel a la traduccion.

18. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

19. The translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author:-that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that he is eminently noble.

20. ?Como reconocer una obra de arte? ?Como separarla, aunque solo sea un momento, de su aparato critico, de sus exegetas, de sus incansables plagiarios, de sus ninguneadores, de su final destino de soledad? Es facil. Hay que traducirla.

21. By far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolano's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English... His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling.

22. Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive.

23. May, 1993 - Stratford... have been reading through the poetry of 15th century Spain, and I find myself drawn to one by the mystic writer and visionary St. John of the Cross; the untitled work is an exquisite, richly metaphoric love poem between himself and his god. It could pass as a love poem between any two at any time ... His approach seems more akin to early Islamic or Judaic works in its more direct route to communication to his god... I have gone over three different translations of the poem, and am struck by how much a translation can alter our interpretation. Am reminded that most holy scriptures come to us in translation, resulting in a diversity of views.

24. May, 1993 - Stratford... have been reading through the poetry of 15th century Spain, and I find myself drawn to one by the mystic writer and visionary St. John of the Cross; the untitled work is an exquisite, richly metaphoric love poem between himself and his god. It could pass as a love poem between any two at any time ... His approach seems more akin to early Islamic or Judaic works in its more direct route to communication to his god... I have gone over three different translations of the poem, and am struck by how much a translation can alter our interpretation. I am reminded that most holy scriptures come to us in translation, resulting in a diversity of views.

25. At last I was able to explain that I hadn't understood the implications of my statement in their language, that I was transliterating and certain words had different meanings and so on and so on

26. The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The 'thing in itself' (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.' To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.

27. Mathematicians are [like] a sort of Frenchmen; if you talk to them, they translate it into their own language, and then it is immediately something quite different.

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

29. Poetry is the first thing lost in translation.

30. Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue - for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. 'Appearance' is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things 'appears' in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.

31. A Selection from Italian Prose Writers: with a double translation: for the use of students of the Italian language on the Hamiltonian system. London, Hunt and Clark, 1828 online from Google Books

32. Rizal, Jose (1887, Berlin) Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer). English translation by Charles Derbyshire published 1912, Philippine Education Co., Manila.Etext available at Project Gutenberg

33. English translation of 'God and the State' (1876)