Beauty of language
I chose Achmet because it is his mother-tongue; and he is an obliging, patient fellow. But he cannot read or write, and that is why I ply my grammar, in the hope of fixing the colloquial: do you not find that a spoken language wafts in and out of your mind, leaving little trace unless you anchor it with print?’
Patrick O'Brian • HMS Surprise
The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and inside languages. You are performing a feat of interpretation... See more
Lauren Collins • Love in Translation
Language, though, is tough and resilient, a tenacity backed up by a long history. Its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged, however roughly it is handled. It is the right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language and expand the range of its effectiveness. Without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
Haruki Murakami • Novelist as a Vocation
When I translate poetry, I have to make the poet whose work I am translating into a character I hope to embody, a character that may not actually exist in English or to English-only readers.
The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation - National Endowment for the Arts
Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. For the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the erotic intention amounted to a “sublime hunger” for the other, the more foreign the more delectating. It is no accident... See more
Lauren Collins • Love in Translation
For me, translation means hearing voices—allowing an author’s voice to sing through my own
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Some of the men we knew declared their love to us in English, the language a deception, a second skin they donned and shed as they wished. We fell in love with these guys, swept up in the slipperiness of their words, their declarations. We were in love. We thought we were in love. We felt sure it was love, this time.