I'm also a huge cinephile, and I have witnessed that to honor the book literally word-for-word never makes a good movie.
Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn't occur to people - or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original.
It's impossible to make a movie out of 'Naked Lunch.' A literal translation just wouldn't work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country of the world.
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.
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
I had a house in Haiti, in the hills above the North Atlantic coast. The house appeared as if out of a dream: my dream to have a foothold in the country. Like many concepts do in Haiti, the phrase 'pied a terre' became literal, material.
The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.
All translation is a compromise - the effort to be literal and the effort to be idiomatic.
The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
In foreign countries, when people see what Donald Trump is saying on Twitter since the election and seeing what he's saying in these calls with foreign leaders, they take everything very seriously and they take everything very literally.
Drill in exact translation is an excellent way of disposing the mind against that looseness and exaggeration with which the sensationalists have corrupted our world. If schools of journalism knew their business, they would graduate no one who could not render the Greek poets.
