Quotes about translation




These are quotes tagged with "translation". You can also search for quotes containing the word translation.

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"Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information -- hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations."

Benjamin, Walter on translation    Share


"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation."

Denham, Sir John on translation    Share

"God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice."

Donne, John on translation    Share

"I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable -- any real insight or broad human sentiment."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on translation    Share

"The test of a given phrase would be: Is it worthy to be immortal? To make a beeline for something. That's worthy of being immortal and is immortal in English idiom. I guess I'll split is not going to be immortal and is excludable, therefore excluded."

Fitzgerald, Robert on translation    Share

"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."

Hamilton, Edith on translation    Share

"Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift."

Mathews, Harry on translation    Share

"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."

Pasternak, Boris on translation    Share

"A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations."

Pound, Ezra on translation    Share

"The best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry."

Sciascia, Leonardo on translation    Share

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

Shelley, Percy Bysshe on translation    Share

"Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life."

Voltaire on translation    Share

"Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language."

Woolf, Virginia on translation
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