Alvaro Enrigue Quotes

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.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

I do that in whatever language of the country I'm in, because the audience appreciate it.

I'm not a xenophobe - I think immigration is a good thing for most countries - but they transmute the foibles of their native tongues into English in a way that's difficult to figure out.

When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.

In Dortmund we had many players from abroad and when you want to put your thoughts in their heads, for example with Pierre-Emerick, you had to switch to English, which is the language most players understand.

I think once you understand a language, you understand the culture surrounding it as well.

I've done songs in other languages. I know how hard it is.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

I want my words to survive translation.

I speak African. I can even speak Italian.

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Translation is at best an echo.

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them.

English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Everyone tells me I have a funny accent. It's because I copy people. I learned English at school but have best friends who are French, Australian, English and American; a very weird mix.

Even when well translated. can we really understand what other cultures are talking about?

Globalize yourself!