Translator Quotes

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.

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.

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

August Wilhelm Schlegel

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 translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

Gregory Rabassa

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

Anybody looking for a quiet life has picked the wrong century to born in.

Whittaker Chambers

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

The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.

The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. … Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.

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

Alan Hollinghurst

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

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.

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

Christian David Ginsburg

It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland, what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life's rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved on our body.

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

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.

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

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.

What is the gospel according to Jesus? Simply this: that the love we all long for in our innermost heart is already present, beyond longing.

Stephen Mitchell (translator)

Will you have all in all for prose and verse? Take the miracle of our age, Sir Philip Sidney.

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

Christopher Marlowe

Now my soul is incarnate in my country,
My body has swallowed her soul,
And I and my country are one.
My name is million, for I love and suffer for millions.

Adam Mickiewicz

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

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

Taraneh Javanbakht