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Quote by Walter Benjamin
Any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function c

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

Other quotes by Walter Benjamin

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Apathy
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Death
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Other Quotes from
Translation
category

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

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

Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language. – Virginia Woolf

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

Random Quotes

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing. – Michel de Montaigne

Category:
Self-Respect

Among creatures born into chaos, a majority will imagine an order, a minority will question the order, and the rest will be pronounced insane. – Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com

Category:
Philosophical

Artistic genius is an expansion of monkey imitativeness. – W. Winwood Reade

Category:
Imitation

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return. – E. M. Forster

Category:
Trains, Railroads