20th-century Translator Quotes

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of a world where respect for the validity of every tradition
will issue in the creation and maintenance of a salubrious political space.

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers. There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Czesław Miłosz

Writers sometimes cast themselves into the most profound depths of despair in order to master it and move on.

Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.

Claire Holden Rothman

Would I be able to transfer my contemporary experience as a translator to the past and feel some measure of ease as I brought the Spanish of the seventeenth century over into the English of the twenty-first?

The Lord's appearing, His coming back, is a warning, an encouragement, and an incentive to us; we should love His appearing and look forward to it with earnest expectation and joy.

No man can establish title to an idea — at most he can only claim possession. The stream of thought that irrigates the mind of each of us is a confluent of the intellectual river that drains the whole of the living universe.

Maurice Valency

I manage a toast to the Christmas tree and one to the sweet absurdity in the miracle of the verb to be. Lucky you, lucky me.

Miller Williams

A myth is first of all a multistoreyed structure, each story being built according to an identical plan but at a different level of abstraction... The child's tale that is the myth's ground floor, as it were, is just as essential as its metaphysical summit.

Michel Tournier

May life remain enamored of its own charm

No one warns young people to follow Adam's example. He waited till God saw his need. Then God made Adam sleep, prepared for his mate, and brought her to him. We need more of this 'being asleep' in the will of God. Then we can receive what He brings us in His own time, if at all. Instead we are set as bloodhounds after a partner, considering everyone we see until our minds are so concerned with the sex problem that we can talk of nothing else when bull-session time comes around. It is true that a fellow cannot ignore women — but he can think of them as he ought — as sisters, not as sparring partners!

The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors... The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.

When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.

Jorge Luis Borges

The presence of death annihilates all superstitions. We are the children of death, and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life. In the midst of life he calls us and summons us to him.

Some extreme optimists argue that North Koreans won't know how to mount the bombs on their missiles. Maybe, they have completed the H-bomb but haven't invented the screwdrivers and ropes yet.

It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author.

Ventseslav Konstantinov

Moria and stultitia are both rendered nowadays as 'folly', but both have far stronger senses than folly has now. They imply derangement of mind, madness, mania. Such are the defects attributed to Christians by the worldly-wise. And vice-versa.

Michael Andrew Screech

The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosophers Stone.

For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.

I was invited to Romania at least once, but was warned that I should not be free to travel where I pleased in the country, but should be more or less confined to the Writers' Union. Because I ceased long ago to be an urban poet and feel claustrophobic in literary conferences, I could not accept such an invitation.

Michael Hamburger