Quotes by Translators - Page 21

To be understood is to prostitute oneself
Fernando Pessoa
No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self
Fernando Pessoa
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Robert Hass
Speak you too,speak as the last,say out your say.Speak-But don’t split off No from Yes.Give your say this meaning too:Give it the shadow.Give it shadow enough,Give it as muchAs you know is spread round you fromMidnight to midday and midnight.Look around:See how things all come alive-By death! Alive!Speaks true who speaks shadow.But now the place shrinks, where you stand:Where now, shadow-stripped, where?Climb. Grope upwards.Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!Finer: a threadThe star wants to descend on:So as to swim down beliow, down hereWhere it sees itself shimmer:in the swellOf wandering words.
Paul Celan
Ultimately, the number of books always exceeds the space they are granted.
Alberto Manguel
But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making
Robert Hass
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Julio Cortázar
Mapidéré was but one man-and indeed, judging by rumors of his decrepit state near death, a weak, sickly man-but his creation, the empire, had taken on a life of its own. Killing the emperor would not have been enough. We have to kill the empire.
Ken Liu
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czesław Miłosz
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.Scruples are alien to the black panther.Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.The self-critical jackal does not exist.The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it.The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
Wisława Szymborska
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
Julio Cortázar
The one sure means of dealing with boredom is to care for someone else to do something kind and good.
Theodore Haecker
The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.
Ken Liu
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
Robert Hass
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard.
Julio Cortázar
The influence of the future on the past," said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
I've always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.
Ken Liu
I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.
Benjamin Moser
A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the –not always greatly hopeful-belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.
Paul Celan
Taking away men's weapons will be not bring peace. They'll fight with sticks and stones, and tooth and nail. Mapidéré's is a peace supported only by fear, as secure as a nest built on a rotten branch.
Ken Liu
Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.
Julio Cortázar
Most Like an Arch This MarriageMost like an arch—an entrance which upholds and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace. Mass made idea, and idea held in place. A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean into a strength. Two fallings become firm. Two joined abeyances become a term naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what’s strong and separate falters. All I do at piling stone on stone apart from you is roofless around nothing. Till we kissI am no more than upright and unset. It is by falling in and in we makethe all-bearing point, for one another’s sake, in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.
John Ciardi
It was the seventh of November, 1918. The war was finally over. Maybe it would be declared a holiday and named War's End Day or something equally hopeful and wrong. Wars would break out again. Violence was part of human nature as much as love and generosity.
Claire Holden Rothman
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
A man who journeys in the desert finds a guide among the desert people, and he who journeys on the sea trusts seamen.
Marmaduke William Pickthall
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Charles Simic
in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.
Dorothy L. Sayers
All letters of love are Ridiculous. They wouldn’t be love letters if they were not Ridiculous.
Fernando Pessoa
The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.
Charles Simic
But when justice is done the world drops away.
Anne Carson
Everything, I thought, everything keeps changing. Changing shape, changing colour, changing sound.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
No one is treated with more patronizing condescension than the unpublished author or, in general, the would-be artist. At best he is commiserated. At worst mocked. He has presumed to rise above others and failed. I still recall a conversation around my father’s deathbed when the visiting doctor asked him what his three children were doing. When he arrived at the last and said young Timothy was writing a novel and wanted to become a writer, the good lady, unaware that I was entering the room, told my father not to worry, I would soon change my mind and find something sensible to do. Many years later, the same woman shook my hand with genuine respect and congratulated me on my career. She had not read my books.
Tim Parks
There's no greater proof of an impoverished mind than its inability to be witty except at other people's expense.
Fernando Pessoa
It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.
Jonathan Galassi
In 90 percent of cases, you could tell within a page or two whether the writer could write.
Jonathan Galassi
The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice, the decadents' approach to the language of fiction frequently leans towards the baroque and the obscure.
Asti Hustvedt
There's a little war in progress here. There won't be anything left of the place if it goes on at this rate." (But it's hard to feign innocence if you've eaten the apple, he reflected.) "And it looks to me as if it is going to go on, because the French aren't going to give in, and certainly the Arabs aren't, because they can't. They're fighting with their backs the the wall.""I thought maybe you meant you expected a new world war," he lied."That's the least of my worries. When that comes, we've had it. You can't sit around mooning about Judgement Day. That's just silly. Everybody who ever lived has always had his own private Judgment Day to face anyway, and he still has. As far as that goes, nothing's changed at all.
Paul Bowles
If I breathe, what will my heart think?If I vomit, what will my soul think?
Xi Chuan
The night has a thousand eyesAnd the day but oneYet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun.
Francis William Bourdillon
He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.
Anne Carson
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
Fernando Pessoa
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
Alberto Manguel
They are not demons, not devils...Worse than that.They are people.
Andrzej Sapkowski
Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring--this is one of the harshest human miseries.
Wisława Szymborska
Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Where the mountain crosses.On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.I wandered away.
Jane Bierhorst
Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an elsewhere, oddly peaceful, a desert or the interior of the sea. Sometimes when he has fallen asleep face upward in the sun, his dreams have taken on this quality of supernatural bright darkness. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
Kreon: here are Kreon's verbs for todayAdjudicateLegislateScandalizeCapitalizehere are Kreon's nounsMenReasonTreasonDeathShip of StateMineChorus: "mine" isn't a nounKreon: it is if you capitalize it
Anne Carson
The people need poetry that will be their own secretTo keep them awake forever,And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.
Osip Mandelstam
I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.
John Heath-Stubbs
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
Alberto Manguel
Unlikely truths are useful and life is full of them, far more than the very worst of novels, no novel would ever dare give houseroom to the infinite number of chances and coincidences that can occur in a single lifetime, let alone all those that have already occurred and continue to occur. It's quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself.
Javier Marías
It must take a lot of self-discipline,' she said.'Oh, I don't know. I don't have much.' He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that 'Dumas, I think it was Dumas, some terrifically prolific Frenchman, said that writing novels is a simple matter - if you write one page a day, you'll write one novel a year, two pages a day, two novels a year, three pages, three novels, and so on. And how long does it take to cover a page with writing? Twenty minutes? An hour? So you see. Very easy really.''I don't know,' she said, laughing. 'I can't even bring myself to write a letter.''Oh, now that's hard.'("Novelty")
John Crowley
Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining-room.
Patrick O'Brian
Hope is like a road in the country there was never a road but when many people walk on it the road comes into existence.
Lin Yutang