On Translation

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

To translate is to descend beneath the exterior disparities of two languages in order to bring into vital play their analogous and, at the final depths, common principles of being.

George Steiner

This word "description" may be disconcerting when used to refer to what is generally called a translation. But when one wishes to render a verbal creation (as opposed to a didactic statement) from one language to another, he is confronted with two equally unsatisfactory choices. He may, according to his talents, elaborate a similar, but never identical creation, or he may describe that creation as completely as possible in his own language.

Gaston Bachelard

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. Guin

La traduction est pour nous tous, gens de lettres, avec la justeproportion de plaisir et de peines qu'elle comporte... une belle et constanteécole de vertu.

Valéry Larbaud

It may not overstate the case to claim that the history of the world could be told through the history of translation. Indeed, one might even assert that without translation, there is no history of the world.

Louis G. Kelly

Translation is change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to go.

Eliot Weinberger

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

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

I don’t understand why people always complain about translators; however, we all coincide that Russian literature is great...

Jorge Luis Borges

Le gioie e le fatiche del tradurre stanno a quelle dello scrivere creativo come quelle dei nonni stanno a quelle dei genitori.

Primo Levi

The translator must be a great editor, a psychologist, a judge of human taste; if not, his translation will be a nightmare. But why should a man with such rare qualities become a translator? Why shouldn’t he be a writer himself, or be engaged in a business where diligent work and high intelligence are well paid? A good translator must be both a sage and a fool: And where do you get such strange combinations?

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Traducir es la forma más profunda de leer.

Gabriel García Márquez

Translation is best defined as that branch of anthropology in which the field comes to the investigator’s office.

Rajendra Singh

A great age of literature is a perhaps always a great age for translations.

Ezra Pound

The job of translation is a trial-and-error process, very similar to what happens in an Oriental bazaar when you're buying a carpet. The merchant asks 100, you offer 10, and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.

Umberto Eco