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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

Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Experience
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Like ultraviolet rays memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text. – Walter Benjamin

Category:
Memory
Author
Walter Benjamin
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Other Quotes from
Translation
category

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

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

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 best thing on translation was said by Cervantes: translation is the other side of a tapestry. – Leonardo Sciascia

Category:
Translation

Random Quotes

My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye. – Wilbur Smith

Category:
smile

I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandmans cares. – George Washington

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Literature for me isnt a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy. – Antonio Tabucchi

Category:
Dreams

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings. – Socrates

Category:
Death