Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

I have friends who read my books in Greek.

Translation is at best an echo.

Of course my books are translated into many languages. I have here, in my home, translations on my shelf of my books into forty-five different languages. Almost none of them I can read. I can read only the English editions. But, I know that a translation of a work of literature is like playing a violin concerto on the piano. You can do this. You can do this very successfully on one strict condition: never try to force the piano to produce the sounds of the violin. This will be grotesque. So, different musical instruments provide for different music.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

I want my words to survive translation.

When people speak their own language you get a much better sense of who they are.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.

I'm a believer in the benefits of translation. It's a necessity and a privilege - it would be awful to be limited to reading authors who's work was composed in the languages I happen to have learned.

I write. I have read a great deal. I enjoy books. I like the wit of languages. Even French I like. I like to be able to think in different modes. I like to be able to use the language a great deal and carry on rehearsals in French.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language.

My children speak very good Chinese, and they translate for our American friends.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

I never found it frustrating not speaking.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.