Quote by Harry Mathews
Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is tr

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift. – Harry Mathews

Other quotes by Harry Mathews

Well, I had this little notion – I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence. – Harry Mathews

Category:
Poetry
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Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say theyre saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest. – Harry Mathews

Category:
Poetry
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Other Quotes from
Translation
category

Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information — hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Translation

Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life. – Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

Category:
Translation

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings. – Boris Pasternak

Category:
Translation

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers. – Edith Hamilton

Category:
Translation

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Fools make researches and wise men exploit them. – H. G. [Herbert George] Wells

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Science already contained all that was necessary, if you just brought it out. – Arthur Young

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The substance of the winds is too thin for human eyes, their written language is too difficult for human minds, and their spoken language mostly too faint for the ears. – John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To the Gulf

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