Dante Alighieri Quotes

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.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Poetry cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language.

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

I am terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music will be put on records forever.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

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

At this moment, by an undeserved stroke of fortune, I am the direct voice of the poets of my race and the indirect voice for the noble Spanish and Portuguese tongues.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.

One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.

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

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

I have friends who read my books in Greek.

Art is exalted above religion and race. Not a single solitary soul these days believes in the religions of the Assyrians, the Egyptians and the Greeks... Only their art, whenever it was beautiful, stands proud and exalted, rising above all time.

Words make love with one another.

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.

Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet.

You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.

You do know what's coming up when you're translating. I suppose the concentration, then, is on finding a formulation which is speakable and in character - and economical as well, actually.

The telling room is, in Spanish, known as 'el contador.'

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.

I come from a family of linguists. My maternal grandparents have been authors and translators.

Language is fossil Poetry.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.