Lydia Davis Quotes

Having translated two plays by Chekhov, and not speaking Russian myself - I cannot say one sentence. This may shock people... However, I am not shocked, as it is not hard to find out what the words mean.

His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.

Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side.

One of the producers, Wonjo, was an amazing interpreter. I don't think we really knew how it was going to work at the beginning. Yet it was something that a couple of days into it seemed so seamless and it wasn't something that we noticed or thought about. A couple of times I cornered him and forced him to speak English but we didn't speak much English at all. That said, I don't think anything was ever lost in translation. It was all very easy.

When it came to a lot of these German actors with the English, they just couldn't do it. They couldn't get the poetry out of it. They couldn't own it and make it their own. And then Christoph [Waltz] came in, and I didn't know who Christoph was.

One of the first issues I dealt with was the struggle to find a language, to find my own words.

Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.

I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.

Having to try and going through the trials and tribulations to actually overcome, to get there to win, to triumph, that's what makes life interesting

Win told me that one isn’t improved by being at the top of the mountain, one is improved by the climb.

I have to. I've been fighting it all night. I'm going to lose. My battle is as futile as a woman feeling the first pangs of labor and deciding it's an inconvenient time to give birth. Nature wins out. It always does.

When I finished the juniors I felt, perhaps for about a year and a half, that everything was going to be the same and that I would be able to go out there and win any match. But it wasn't the case. I struggled. It took me time to adjust and to realise it was not going to happen like it did in the juniors. It was three years between the junior ranks and reaching the Australian Open, and even then, having reached the final against Hingis, I wasn't really realising what it would take to go higher.

Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered.

A liberation struggle is like a struggle against dirt. No matter what type of bath you takein three weeks you'll smell like you've never seen a bathtub. What we don't understand about a liberation struggle is you never win it, any more than you "win" clean dishes. As soon as you eat on them, the dishes are dirty again.

remember this: no matter how politely or distinctly you ask a Parisian a question he will persist in answering you in French.

Blame the guy who doesn't speak Engish.

Do you speak Chopnese huh? Do ya? Chop chop chop chop chop. Aha you don't.

It's better to fight because if you don't fight, you can't win. Besides, even when you don't win, you can change the game.

Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn't love

Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.

We don't win what we don't fight for.

Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!

When somebody says something I don't agree with, I say I'd rather not. It comes to the point where that is the strongest form of resistance. As a Mexican, it took me a long while to learn one word in English, "no". And that is the one word we have in common.

Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.