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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

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Art
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Absence
Author
Walter Benjamin
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The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Art
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Other Quotes from
Translation
category

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. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Category:
Translation

The test of a given phrase would be: Is it worthy to be immortal? To make a beeline for something. Thats worthy of being immortal and is immortal in English idiom. I guess Ill split is not going to be immortal and is excludable, therefore excluded. – Robert Fitzgerald

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

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

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The wretch who lives without freedom feels like dressing in the mud from the streets Those who have you, o Liberty, do not know. you. Those who do not have you should not speak of you, but win you. – Jose Marti

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Dreams From My Father reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after theyre dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader. – Jonathan Raban

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For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. – Friedrich Nietzsche

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A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. – Henry A. Wallace

Category:
Money