Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

I think when you translate songs, you lose the real essence and the meaning.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.

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

The difficulty that many foreign authors face in having their works translated into English has effects far beyond the United States.

When the uncreative tell the creative what to do, it stops being art.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I wouldn't exclude writing another song in German, but I don't want to translate songs anymore. We used to sit down and literally translate every song word for word - it was very technical, and the songs would lose so much along the way.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

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.

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.

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

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.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

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

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

The technician should never forget that he is an artist, the artist never that he is a technician

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

The measure of artistic merit is the length to which a writer is willing to go in following his own compulsions.