Translation

(227 votes)   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.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822, British Poet

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

Walter Benjamin
1982-1940, German Critic, Philosopher

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(96 votes)   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.

Harry Mathews
1930-, American Novelist

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(90 votes)   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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(90 votes)   Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

Ursula K. Le Guin
1929-, American Author

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(84 votes)   Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.

Virginia Woolf
1882-1941, British Novelist, Essayist

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(84 votes)   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.

Robert Fitzgerald
1910-1985, American Scholar, Translator

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(84 votes)   To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

Paul Goodman
1911-1972, American Author, Poet, Critic

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(78 votes)   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.

Edith Hamilton
1867-1963, American Classical Scholar, Translator

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