William Cowper Quotes

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

The writing I do makes great demands on translators.

It is neither the best nor the worst things in a book that defy translation.

It is a commonplace that Racine is untranslatable. This is not because his verse is difficult, but because it is not.

A translation in verse . . . seems to me something absurd, impossible.

Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

I have made a very rude translation of the Seven against Thebes, and Pindar too I have looked at, and wish he was better worth translating. I believe even the best things are not equal to their fame. Perhaps it would be better to translate fame itself,--or is not that what the poets themselves do? However, I have not done with Pindar yet.

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.

For instance, when "Gender trouble " is translated into Japanese, it produces a problem of vocabulary and a way of thinking about a quality for instance that is somewhat controversial in academic circles and also outside of the academy. In other places, "Gender trouble" is old.

Nothing in a language is less translatable than its modes of understatement.

A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower -- and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel.

The white light of truth, in traversing the many sided transparent soul of the poet, is refracted into iris-hued poetry.

the translator, a lonely sort of acrobat, becomes confused in a labyrinth of paradox, or climbs a pyramid of dependent clauses and has to invent a way down from it in his own language.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

You searched through all my poets, From Sappho through to Auden, I saw the book fall from your hands, As you slowly died of boredom.

The magic gets lost in translation.

When translating one must proceed up to the intranslatable; only then one becomes aware of the foreign nation and the foreign tongue.

Nothing which is harmonized by the bond of the Muse can be changed from its own to another language without destroying its sweetness

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.