Translation Quotes

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original.

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Say what we may of the inadequacy of translation, yet the work is and will always be one of the weightiest and worthiest undertakings in the general concerns of the world.

I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Translations increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

What Shakespeare was able to do in English he would certainly not have done in French.