Translation Quotes

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

The other thing that I started doing for myself was, I went through my diary of ideas that I keep and made sure that the translation of the comic to the movie was good.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

I encourage the translators of my books to take as much license as they feel that they need. This is not quite the heroic gesture it might seem, because I've learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself.

The Japanese version comes with a translation, but that's different from the lyrics, so people could look things up and find a translation of their own if they're interested.

Translation is the art of failure.

I would love mainland Chinese to read my book. There is a Chinese translation which I worked on myself, published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Many copies have gone into China but it is still banned.

Prayer is translation. A man translates himself into a child asking for all there is in a language he has barely mastered.

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

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.

For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.

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.

I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was.

And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow.

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

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

What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.

The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.

What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.