Translator Quotes

Jorge Luis Borges

Adam Mickiewicz

Boris Vian

Seamus Heaney

Prosper Mérimée

Czesław Miłosz

Christopher Marlowe

Fate chooses our relatives, we choose our friends.

Jacques Delille

I am the Love that dare not speak its name.

Lord Alfred Douglas

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

The Kabbalah was first taught by God himself to a select company of angels, who formed a theosophic school in Paradise.

Christian David Ginsburg

Behold the state of man's unstable mind,
Still prone to change with every changing wind!
All our resolves are weak, but weakest prove
Where sprung from sense of disappointed love.

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!

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

And a rose, she lived as roses do, the space of a morn.

François de Malherbe

I was amongst the virtues like the great Turk in his seraglio of women, and I chose to dwell with that virtue which looked the fairest in my eyes and gave me at that season most pleasure. In short, I made wives of them: I first admired them, then made them my own property, and if they would not submit to my will, I again turned them off and divorced them.

I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. Now there is no more catching one's own eye in the mirror, there are no bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of cours eno illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket. The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.

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

The round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

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

Throughout my life, I have always found that events which seemed at the time disastrous ultimately developed into positive blessings.

Elisabeth Marbury

Ah fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate, Fair is too foul an epithet for thee.

Christopher Marlowe

The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly.

Richard Hakluyt

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

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

Ventseslav Konstantinov

The life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man.

All my life I have preserved in the depths of my heart a live faith in my Creator, the Defender of the World, in His Sanctifying Grace and in the expiatory sacrifice of Christ our Saviour, but never have I agreed that true religion demands outward manifestations.

I would willingly give Thucydides for some authentic memoirs by Aspasia or by a slave of Pericles.

Prosper Mérimée

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.

Perfect happiness, by princes sought, Is not with birth born, nor exchequers bought.

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