Poetry Translation Quotes

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

I've written and translated my own poems from English to German. It's basically a summation of my identity as it stands now.

We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.

I have translated Bengali poets such as Subhash Mukhopadhyay and Sunil Gangopadhyay before. These were published by Hindi and Urdu magazines. But to take on Tagore's work is no easy task.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator's voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.

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.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.

Samuel Marshak was one of the founders of modern Russian children's literature. Soviet children used to know his poems by heart, but only since glasnost have American editors shown any interest in issuing his poems here.

To translate poetry, one has to possess some art, at the very least the art of stylistic re-embodiment.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

You have an absolute right to translate poetry in any form with any sound. It's all up for grabs.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

You've often heard me say - perhaps too often - that poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says and it says what it means, nothing less but nothing more.

I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.

One can translate an editorial but not a poem. For one can go across the border naked but not without one's skin; for, unlike clothes, one cannot get a new skin.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original.