Walter Benjamin Quotes

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

Translators can be considered as busy matchmakers who praise as extremely desirable a half-veiled beauty. They arouse an irresistible yearning for the original.

The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.

I saw Chekhov a number of times in English, and I thought that it translates very well in English, for some reason, from the Russian to the English.

Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate, That few, but such as cannot write, translate.

Words are where most change begins.

Things were first made, then words.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

The language in New Mexico is very different. At first when you hear the speech here, you don't really know what to do with it, but then I just went with it, because as a writer as well as a translator I do believe that translated words are not different names for the same thing. They're different names for different things. I tried to stay as true as I could, so I used Ruben Cobos' dictionary of Southwestern Spanish, and when I went into Spanish I never assumed the word I would use would be the word a nuevomexicano would use.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

What if my words Were meant for deeds.

Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

The beginning is the word and the end is silence. And in between are all the stories.

What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.

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.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures