Amos Oz Quotes

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.

Things can be translated, but they become different.

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.

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.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

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.

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

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

Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.

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

Translation is not original creation - that is what one must remember. In translation, some loss is inevitable.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. 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.

It is useless to read Greek in translation; translators can but offer us a vague equivalent.

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

I do not hesitate to read. all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable-any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Each actor requires a different language.

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

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Grandma frowned and yelled something in Russian. She could have been saying, 'Open up, your best friend is here.' On the other hand, it could have been, 'America is a great country because of canned ravioli.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

There are stories of Maui everywhere in the South Pacific. They're different. Different areas have different interpretations. But and so we [with John Musker] fashioned, that was kind of the inspiration and we came up with a very simple basic storyline, focusing on Maui.