Halagos Translation Quotes

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them. ~ Wladyslaw Reymont

No I do not like blaming. Because for me it's enough
if someone is other than bad - not too much out of hand,
conscious at least of the justice that helps the city,
a healthy man. No I shall not
lay blame. Because fools
are a species that never ends.
All things, you know, are beautiful with which
ugly things are not mixed. ~ Simonides Of Ceos

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of. ~ Paul Auster

They're auras, Davey. I see them, too. The longer you stare at them, the wider the energy field expands until more colors begin to show themselves. ~ Christina Westover

The language of translation ought never to attract attention to itself. ~ John Hookham Frere

The original language of Christianity is translation. ~ Lamin Sanneh

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures ~ Susan Sontag

...It is the one time Dante calls such explicit attention to the idea of contrapasso-a word for which we have no exact translation, no precise definition in English, because the word in itself is its definition... Well, my dear Longfellow, I would say countersuffering ... the notion that each sinner must be punished by continuing the damage of his own sin against him... just as these Schismatics are cut apart... ~ Matthew Pearl

«"We're talking about the technical aspects of translation again. Do I have to do all the work here? Who can tell me one of the problems translators face?" Rashmi raises her hand. "Well, most words have different meanings." "Good," Professeur Cole says. "More. Elaborate." St. Clair sits next to Rashmi, but he's not listening. He scribbles something fiercely in the margins of his book. "Well," Rashmi says. "It's the translator's job to determine which definition the author means. And not only that, but there could be other meanings in relation to the context."55 "So what you're saying," Professeur Cole says, "is that the translator has a lot of decisions to make. That there are multiple meanings to be found in any word, in any sentence. In any situation." "Exactly," Rashmi says. And then she cuts her eyes at me.» ~ Stephanie Perkins

My mother died yesterday, yesterday many years ago. You know, what amazed me the most the next day after her leaving was the fact that the buildings were still in place, the streets were still full of cars running, full of people who were walking, seemingly ignoring that my whole world has just disappeared.
(rough translation) ~ Marc Levy

(Claude and Marcel LeFever were speaking in French. This simultaneous English translation is being beamed to the reader via literary satellite.) ~ Tom Robbins

They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream. ~ Karen Thompson Walker

Translation is so important. The new American translations of the Bible sound like a Judith Krantz novel. ~ Rabih Alameddine

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

...it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language...So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew... ~ Rachel Cusk

including one gentleman who had been introduced as a poet, although Laurence could not believe this had been an accurate translation: more likely the man was a clerk of some sort. ~ Naomi Novik

the book of genesis received its English name from the Greek translation of the Heb word toledot, which is used thirteen times in Genesis and is translated as "story" (2.4), "record" (5.1), or "line" (10.1). In Heb, it is known, like many books in the Tanakh, by its first word, bereshit, which means, "In the beginning. ~ Adele Berlin

Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. ~ Anne Michaels

I've translated a lot of American literature into Japanese, and I think that what makes a good translator is, above all, a feel for language and also a great affection for the work you're translating. If one of those elements is missing the translation won't be worth much. ~ Haruki Murakami

As Einstein once wrote (more ringingly in German than in this English translation by one of us [DG]) to honor Isaac Newton: Look unto the stars to teach us How the master's thoughts can reach us Each one follows Newton's math Silently along its path. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene, and shows, in this discomfiting, hypnotic work, just how rarely those categories are what they seem. The translation is excellent - what a rare relief. ~ Benjamin Moser

WORK MAKES MEN. A university is not merely a place for making scholars, it is a place for making Christians. A farm is not a place for growing corn, it is a place for growing character, and a man has no character except that which is developed by his life and thought. God's Spirit does the building through the acts which a man performs from day to day. A student who cons out every word in his Latin and Greek instead of consulting a translation finds that honesty is translated into his character. If he works out his mathematical problems thoroughly, he not only becomes a mathematician, but becomes a thorough man. It is by constant and conscientious attention to daily duties that thoroughness and conscientiousness and honorableness are imbedded in our beings. Character is ~ Henry Drummond

I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation. ~ Walt Whitman

Get this. So he comes up to me at lunch, right? And he starts asking me all these questions about you. Like, how long have I known you, where are you from, did I ever meet your mom before she skipped town ... '
'My mom? That's weird,' Helen interrupted.
'And I start answering him with my usual flair for clever repartee,' Claire said, a bit too innocently.
'Translation: you insulted him. ~ Josephine Angelini

Peter suggests that we never forget one fact: 'That with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years is as one day.' Translation: God sets His watch to a time zone not accessible to us. Once again we need to remember that He is the one who created time, like everything else, and He uses it for His own purposes.
I like the little story about the foolishness of quantifying God's timing. A little boy asked God, 'How long is a second in heaven?' God said, 'One million years.' The boy asked, 'How much is a penny in heaven?' God answered, 'One million dollars.' The boy said, 'Could I have a penny?' To which God answered, 'In just a second. ~ David Jeremiah

So much gets lost in the translation. Even if you sat there listening to it with a microscope, there's no way you're gonna find out what it means. ~ Frank Zappa

When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog's being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery -- Ivan Pavlov's explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn't even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person -- not a dog professional -- could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin's performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary. ~ Susan Orlean

Ceux qui revent eveilles ont conscience de 1000 choses qui echapent a ceux qui ne revent qu'endormis.
The one who has day dream are aware of 1000 things that the one who dreams only when he sleeps will never understand.
(it sounds better in french, I do what I can with my translation ... ) ~ Edgar Allan Poe

Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. ( ... ) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. ( ... ) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation
we're often aware of her struggle
but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat. ~ Michelle Huneven

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. ~ William Cowper

Intuition is a method of feeling one's way intellectually into the inner heart of a thing, in order to locate what is unique and inexpressible in it. If there is a way of grasping a reality in absolute rather than relative terms, of entering into it rather than taking up positions on it, of seizing hold of it without any translation or symbolism, then that way is metaphysics itself. ~ Henri Bergson

Translation work involves knowing not just the structure of the language to be translated, but the cultural framework
that surrounds it. ~ Corinne McKay

Bye-bye. Nice knowing you. But if you are waiting for that perfect idea to strike like lightning during a dust storm (I live in New Mexico), you could be waiting a long time. Ideas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. I can't walk to the bathroom without being hit with another idea. It's what you DO with that idea that matters.
Here is your mantra: BICHOK, BICHOK, BICHOK
Translation: Butt in chair, hands on keys. Just write. Every stinking day. ~ Darynda Jones

An amino acid residue (other than glycine) has no symmetry elements. The general operation of conversion of one residue of a single chain into a second residue equivalent to the first is accordingly a rotation about an axis accompanied by translation along the axis. Hence the only configurations for a chain compatible with our postulate of equivalence of the residues are helical configurations. ~ Linus Pauling

I think that translating is the most profound, most intimate way of reading. A translation is a wonderful, dynamic encounter between two languages, two texts, two writers. It entails a doubling, a renewal ... It was a way of getting close to different languages, of feeling connected to writers very distant from me in space and time. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

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

Paradoxically, our imperial global Anglo-American language is dull with the glitter of its own decay. In response, the new meta- physical poet might consider the following cleansing strategies: keep faith with the canonical writers of the past, study Homeric Greek, excavate etymologies, embrace threatened languages, practice the fine art of translation, listen regularly to the musical flow of the breath and the beat of the heart, switch off the television, become a votary of silence.
Here lies the beginning of freedom. ~ Peter Abbs

Nothing she says or does would surprise me." Gideon faced the helm once more, putting his back to Barnaby. He wasn't about to go anywhere near Sara again, not the way he was feeling now. Let Barnaby deal with her today.
"Maybe not, but that doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about. You've got more schooling than I have, but isn't Lysistrata the play where the women refuse to have relations with their husbands until the men agree to stop going to war?"
With a groan, Gideon clenched the wheel. Lysistrata was among the many words of literature his father had forced down his throat once he was old enough to read. "Yes. But don't try to tell me she's teaching them that. It's Greek, for god's sake. They wouldn't understand a word, even if she knew it well enough to recite it."
"She knows it well enough to give them a free translation, I assure you. When I left her she was telling them the story with great enthusiasm."
Barnaby reached for the helm when Gideon swung away from it with an oath. "I should never have taken her aboard," he grumbled as he strode for the ladder. "I should have sent her back to England gagged and bound! ~ Sabrina Jeffries