#translation

And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11. ↗

— Sibel Edmonds

#after #before #bureau #documents #duties

While he was cautiously preambling, I tried to form a picture of all he did each day to earn his calories, all his grimaces and promises, pretty much like my own . . . And then to amuse myself, I imagined him all naked at his altar . . . It's a good habit to get into: when somebody comes to see you, quick reduce him to nakedness, and you'll see through him in a flash, regardless of who it is, you will instantly discern the underlying reality, namely an enormous, hungry maggot. It's good sleight-of-the-imagination. His lousy prestige vanishes, evaporates. Once you've got him naked you'll be dealing with nothing more than a bragging pretentious beggar, talking drivel of one kind or another. It's a test that nothing can withstand. In a moment you'll know where you are at. There wont be anything left but ideas, and there's nothing frightening about ideas. With ideas nothing is lost, everything can be straightened out. Whereas it's sometimes hard to stand up to the prestige of a man with his clothes on. Nasty smells and mysteries cling to his clothes. ↗

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

#imagination

In fact I don't think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you're born is simply an accident of fate. I don't see why I shouldn't be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn't born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human. ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#european-novelists #literary-tradition #literature-in-translation #art

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. ↗

— Gilbert Murray

#aristotle #being #closely #english #equivalent

All religions are based on obsolete terminology. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#philosophy #philosophy-of-religion #religion #theology #translation

Id Faciam What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds the nail that now is driven into itself, why. ↗

— Catullus

#love

I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow?  ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#books #cats #homonyms #meow #translate

Translation is the art of failure. ↗