20th-century Translator Quotes

Jorge Luis Borges

Boris Vian

Seamus Heaney

Czesław Miłosz

Imre Kertész

Marguerite Yourcenar

J. M. G. Le Clézio

History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but also difficult to state who is a foreigner.

When the machine grinds to a halt, the cogs themselves begin wondering about their function.

The best critic of a translation is its second translation and nothing else. The person who translates a text should have something to say about that.

Being involved in sciences or various arts is not a reason for neglecting the causes of social problems.

Taraneh Javanbakht

Life and existence have no value in themselves. We mean nothing; not even those who are needed mean anything. The only thing of real value is what we produce.

Ninni Holmqvist

The long-haired Yak has long black hair, He lets it grow — he doesn't care. He lets it grow and grow and grow, He lets it trail along the stair. Does he ever go to the barbershop? NO! How wild and woolly and devil-may-care A long-haired Yak with long black hair Would look when perched in a barber chair!

William Jay Smith

Just go along with things and let your mind move freely. Resign yourself to what cannot be avoided and nourish what is within you - this is best. What more do you have to do to fulfill your mission? Nothing is as good as following orders (obeying fate) - that's how difficult it is!

Time is of the essence,
The crowd and players
Are the same age always,
But the man in the stand,
Is older every season.

Rolfe Humphries

Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.

I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: How clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity, etc.

Janwillem van de Wetering

Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.

Take care of things close to home first. Straighten up your room
before you save the world. Then save the world.

Mindfulness was experienced as not holding onto the past, the future, or 'nowness:' but relaxing into the immediacy of whatever was happening.

Ramallah is not Auschwitz. Israel is not the Third Reich. We have no death camps and we haven't massacred one third of the Palestinian population in gas chambers. Therefore, everything we do is quite all right. We may fill the occupied territories with tear gas and blood, we may kill and injure and torture and blackmail and dispossess, we may surround millions by electric fences and tanks in tiny enclaves, we may hold them under siege and daily bombing, we may make pregnant women walk to hospitals, and we shoot ambulances too, don't we. But as long as we fall even an inch short of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it's all fine and good, and don't you dare make the comparison.

Do not doubt him who tells you he is afraid, but be afraid of him who tells you he has no doubts.

I have lost the consolation of faith/ though not the ambition to worship

The desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return.

J. M. G. Le Clézio

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large.

Philip Sherrard

Wherever the Jew is found he is a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him. Ever since he has been scattered in your midst he has had to maintain a continuous struggle for the conservation of his identity.

All poetry and music, and art of every true sort, bears witness to man's continual falling in love with beauty and his desperate attempt to induce beauty to live with him and enrich his common life.

John Bertram Phillips

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

Alan Hollinghurst

Like the best convenience store in the world, / the mind is always open.

The moon, appearing every month in several phases, is symbolic of the Jewish people whose history has assumed a variety of phases. Like the moon, they reappear aftern being eclipsed.

Philip Birnbaum

I don't know what a personal gift is. I think if I really gave someone a personal gift, it would scare him to death. I don't know what a personal gift for myself would be, either. But I'm sure that if it were really personal, I would burst into tears. At least I'd know then what sort of person I am.