Some of my favorite translation quotes...
“writers create national literatures with their language, but world literature is written by translators”
--remark by José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for literature, during a speech to attendees
of the Fourth Latin American Conference on Translation and Interpretation in Buenos Aires in May
2003
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il testo da tradurre “È sempre un appello che chiede di essere
ascoltato…”
--Gianni Vattimo nella sua prefazione a Barbara Lanati, Pareti di cristallo, Besa
2007
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“The translator has to do consciously what the author did instinctively. And yet it must seem
instinctive.”
--Richard Pevear
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“A curious feeling, a mixture of pleasure and concern. Analogous to how every good driver feels when he finds himself riding as a passenger in a car driven by someone else. He knows that the driver will get him to his destination, but he is on pins and needles because he sees him perform every maneuver at a different pace, a second before or after he would have done it, a little faster, a little slower.”
--Giulio Leoni on being translated, from interview in Absinthe: New European Writing,
Spring 2008
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“Je n'ai pas lu Homère en grec, ni Dostoïevski en russe. C'est le destin de la littérature. Même quand je lis un livre en anglais, je ne comprends pas tout. Ce n'est pas grave...”
--from an article by Robert Solé on the philosopher Khoury:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3260,36-954573@51-946814,0.html
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“Grossman once said, ‘A translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation’.”
--cited by Cynthia L. Haven in a review of The Golden Age: Poems of the Spanish Renaissance, translated by Edith Grossman; the review appeared in the NYTBR, Sunday, September 3,
2006
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“Translation is the circulatory system of the world´s
literatures”
--Susan Sontag http://www.aclals.org/nl-2k3.pdf
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translation as playing someone else’s music:
“With keyboard music you have the feeling of reproducing what the composers were doing, and so you're in their minds to some degree. Not in the most mysterious part, where the music originates, but still, you're not merely passively absorbing an aesthetic experience. You are, in your own clumsy way, somehow producing it yourself.”
Philip Roth, The Dying Animal
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but can you make pudding?
“My old friend, Mrs. Carter, could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus”.
--John Boswell, Life of Johnson
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hunting mice and words:
I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night. […]
So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
--from the Gaelic (Old Irish), Anonymous, early 9th century. Robin
Flower, tr.
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translation as a close reading:
“Traducir es la forma más profunda de leer”.
--Gabriel García Márquez
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“The translator is the only one who truly reads a text and reads it in its profundity, in all its layers, weighing and appraising every word and every image and perhaps even discovering its empty and false passages. When he is able to find or even invent the solution to a knot, he feels sicut deus [like god]...
”
--from Primo Levi’s essay “On translating and being translated”, Zaia
Alexander, tr.
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there is no definitive translation! only drafts, approximations, versions:
Borges left several essays on the act of translation that his translator Andrew Hurley found “extraordinarily liberating to the translator” since they make the point that every translation is a “version”, not the translation of whatever, but a translation, one of an infinite possible series
--from “A Note on the Translation” by Andrew Hurley, Collected
Fictions
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translation as transformation:
“Bottom thou art translated”
--Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”, Act III, Sene 1