Quotes

"Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful."

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"The translator's task is  much harder than  that of the original author."

Theodore Savory

"Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. Despite all the difficulties the two have faced, sometimes separately, usually together, they need and nurture each other, and their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live." 


Edith Grossman

"Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture." 

Anthony Burgess

"Why is translation so important? Information is power, but the amount of information that is currently inaccessible to the world population is mind-boggling. Much like scientists who discover more each day about the mysteries of the human brain, translation enables us to tap into more of our collective repository of human knowledge." 


Nataly Kelly

"To translate, one must have a style of his own, for otherwise the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author."

Paul Goodman

"Traduttore, traditore."

Italian proverb

"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."

J. W. Goethe

"A great age  of literature is perhaps  always a great age of translations" 

Ezra Pound