Poetry In Translation Quotes

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original. ~ Fanny Howe

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation. ~ Robert Morgan

What bizarre things does not one find in a great city when one knows how to walk about and how to look! Life swarms with innocent monsters. Oh Lord my God, Thou Creator, Thou Master, Thou who hast made law and liberty, Thou the Sovereign who dost allow, Thou the Judge who dost pardon, Thou who art full of Motives and of Causes, Thou who hast (it may be) placed within my soul the love of horror in order to turn my hear to Thee, like the cure which follows the knife; Oh Lord, have pity, have pity upon the mad men and women that we are! Oh Creator, is it possible that monsters should exist in the eyes of Him alone who knoweth why they exist, how they have made themselves, and how they would have made themselves, and could not? ~ Charles Baudelaire

Dreams, always dreams! and the more ambitious and delicate is the soul, the more its dreams bear it away from possibility. Each man carries in himself his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed. From birth to death, how many hours can we count that are filled by positive enjoyment, by successful and decisive action? Shall we ever live, shall we ever pass into this picture which my soul has painted, this picture which resembles you?

These treasures, this furniture, this luxury, this order, these perfumes, these miraculous flowers, they are you. Still you, these mighty rivers and these calm canals! These enormous ships that ride upon them, freighted with wealth, whence rise the monotonous songs of their handling: these are my thoughts that sleep or that roll upon your breast. You lead them softly towards that sea which is the Infinite; ever reflecting the depths of heaven in the limpidity of your fair soul; and when, tired by the ocean's swell and gorged with the treasures of the East, they return to their port of departure, these are still my thoughts enriched which return from the Infinite - towards you. ~ Charles Baudelaire

My name used to be in the papers daily
As having dined somewhere,
Or traveled somewhere,
Or rented a house in Paris,
Where I entertained the nobility.
I was forever eating or traveling,
Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.
Now I am here to do honor
To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.
No one cares now where I dined,
Or lived, or whom I entertained,
Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden! ~ Edgar Lee Masters

At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Gloomy room
immersed in a scent
of modern cowards
filled with
shapeless creatures
sitting in silence
because they have
nothing to say

Fake plastic faces
with a grimace
of disappointment
painted on them

Are we stuck on hold
expecting our turn
in a waiting room
of so-called
lost generation? ~ Asper Blurry

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't. ~ C. K. Williams

Sound had always been my portal to poetry, but in the beginning, sound was imagined through the eye. ~ Donald Hall

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry. ~ Stephen Colbert

Sleeping Wrestler

You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it's just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it's thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I'm one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you're going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler ~ Mutsuo Takahashi

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words - or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols - spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These thing ~ G.K. Chesterton

Everything has been planned. The ascent will be completed in two days' time. He will climb another one hundred floors today. Another hundred the next day. He does not want to take the lift. The rush of life causes people to drown in the temporary. He wishes to dip into eternity before he leaves. ~ Isa Kamari

She lends her pen,
to thoughts of him,
that flow from it,
in her solitary.
For she is his poet,
And he is her poetry. ~ Lang Leav

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant. ~ Janice Erlbaum

Ever since I could remember, I'd been engaging in literary transference/transplantation/translation from one culture to another. Growing up on English literature, I taught myself to see my daily reality reflected in my reading material, while plumbing its universal truths in search of particulars... In reading English literature with a Pakistani lense, it seemed to me that all cultures were concerned with the same eternal questions and that people were more similar to one another than they were different. As Alys Binat says in Unmarriagble, "Reading widely can lead to an appreciation of the universalities across cultures."

But as Valentine Darsee says, "We've been forced to seek ourselves in the literature of others for too long. ~ Soniah Kamal

If you're going to love a poet you should know this. Our words are our truths. Our blood hums with verse. We break easily. Our words save us. Our stanzas keep us alive. If we loved you at all, we loved you truly. And you will never leave us but live under our skin and beneath the tips of our fingers and in the ink spill on blank page.
Because poetry, like some love, is forever. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

In this unlighted cave, one step forward
That step can be the down-step into the Abyss.
But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus
Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only
Roll down the mountain,
Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many
Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

In communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves. ~ Kate Braverman

Somewhere between poetry and science, somewhere between heaven and earth, clairaudience is born. Clairaudience is the sweetest mystery any human being could ever experience. Fortunately, it is the most contagious, too. Most, if not all, of my students walk away with some level of clairaudience after spending three hours in one of my workshops. ~ Amelia Kinkade

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America. ~ Rita Dove

A poem begins as an inner tune in the heart that beats with emotions and words waiting to be played with love. ~ Debasish Mridha

I'm not afraid of anything anymore. I've found out Ghosts don't hide under my bed or in my closets either. They exist in plain sight - everyday; Conjured up by 'our song' playing on the radio. By the mailman's blue eyes that are so like yours I could get utterly lost in them. They come as raindrops, kissing my skin... the way you used to. Ghosts are everywhere. ~ Alfa Holden

Twas noontide of summer,
And mid-time of night;
And stars, in their orbits,
Shone pale, thro' the light
Of the brighter, cold moon,
'Mid planets her slaves,
Herself in the Heavens,
Her beam on the waves.
I gazed awhile
On her cold smile;
Too cold–too cold for me-
There pass'd, as a shroud,
A fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee,
Proud Evening Star,
In thy glory afar,
And dearer thy beam shall be;
For joy to my heart
Is the proud part
Thou bearest in Heaven at night,
And more I admire
Thy distant fire,
Than that colder, lowly light. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Your love is poetry in perpetual motion capturing my heart with centrifugal force. ~ Truth Devour

Each in His Own Tongue
A fire mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jellyfish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave men dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod -
Some call it Evolution,
And others call it God.
A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite, tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high;
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod -
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God.

Like tides on a crescent sea beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come welling and surging in;
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod -
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.

A picket frozen on duty,
A mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking the hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood;
And millions who, humble and nameless,
The straight, hard pathway plod -
Some call it Consecration,
And others call it God. ~ William Herbert Carruth

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether, the trick they miss is that being called this thing, with the weight of tradition behind it, and with the association of the Royal family, does allow you to have conversations and to open doors, and wallets, for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow. ~ Andrew Motion

The zoologists who came from Germany to inseminate the elephant
wore bicycle helmets and protective rubber suits.
So as not to be soiled by effluvium and excrement,
which will alchemize to produce laughter in the human species,
how does that work biochemically is a question
to which I have not found an answer yet. ~ Lucia Perillo

Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. ~ Nizar Qabbani

Shakespeare has been praised in English more than anything mortal except poetry itself. Fame exhausts thought in his eulogy. ~ George Edward Woodberry

Why can't we breathe now,
In this moment we have breath? ~ Jenim Dibie

My poetry lives in the spaces of time, in between time, in time out. It is not a constant vibe; I catch it like the incoming tide, going out again. It will not let me say what I want to say for words cannot be woven together to express me that way. My words have learned to be patient for nothing. Now is my time out. ~ Tonny K. Brown

The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds. ~ Woodrow Wilson

Did you finish yours, Kota?"
"Working on it now, Actually."
"How's it going?"
He sat up, turning in his chair and holding up his notebook. "I don't know. What rhymes with formaldehyde?"
My eyes widened. Gabriel laughed, rubbing his fingers against his forehead. "Dude, what kind of poem are you writing?"
Kota blinked at us. "It's about a doctor."
"Does the doctor fall in love?" Gabriel asked.
"No."
"Does someone die?"
"Not in the story, technically."
"What does he do?"
"He performs an autopsy. ~ C.L.Stone