Miguel de Cervantes Quotes

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

Translating is writing.

A major difficulty in translation is that a word in one language seldom has a precise equivalent in another one.

Things can be translated, but they become different.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

A poet's mission is to make words do more work than they normally do, to make them work on more than one level.

Translation is the art of failure.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

My joke is that my father was a minister and my mother was an English teacher, so I'm trained to see the world in terms of symbols, which is hard when you just want to make toast.

I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.

Translation is at best an echo.

It was real Cheyenne. I would get the translations the night before, but it was very difficult because it was not like any other language you would be familiar with.

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

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

My film is in French. It's not something folkloric. It's who we are. There's this tension about immigrants coming in. Will they learn French? Will they adapt? In this film, I'm on the reverse side because Monsieur Lazhar comes from a society where French is also the second language.

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.

Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.

In some sense the text and the translator are locked in struggle - 'I attacked that sentence, it resisted me, I attacked another, it eluded me' - a struggle in which, curiously, when the translator wins, the text wins too.