A Quote by Gregory Rabassa

A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

Gregory Rabassa

Quote Topics

Differently Essentially Except Print Read Reader Reading Remains Translator Unchanging

Quote Author

Gregory Rabassa
American - Translator
March 9, 1922 - June 14, 2016

The translator has to be a good writer. The translator has to hear music too. And it might not be exactly your music because the translator needs to translate the music. And so, that is what you are hoping for: a translator who gets what you are doing but who also gets all the ways in which it won't work in the new language.

Sam Lipsyte

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

Andreï Makine

I have always maintained that translation is essentially the closest reading one can possibly give a text. The translator cannot ignore "lesser" words, but must consider every jot and tittle.

Gregory Rabassa

It's important to get a translator who will ask the questions in a sensitive and thoughtful way. Knowing the ethnicity issues, the tribal issues in some places...who your translator is can mean a lot.

Peter Menzel

When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.

Sam Lipsyte

What is the task of the translator? I think the task depends on the book and on the translator.

Idra Novey

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

W. H. Auden

To me a translator is very, very important. If the fixer is also the translator, so much the better. I have known photographers who didn't speak the language and would work in a place for weeks without one, getting by on common sense and smiles. But how many situations did they miss because they couldn't talk to someone and get the back story on details, small daily life things, etc.

Peter Menzel

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.

Lydia Davis

I always read the translator's draft all the way through - a very laborious business.

W. G. Sebald

In Japan they're definitely more over the top. They had four Boogie stacks and 20 guitars. But otherwise it's pretty much the same thing, except there's a translator. It's really nice.

John Petrucci

I'm a writer because I love reading. I love the conversation between a reader and a writer, and that it all takes place in a book-sort of a neutral ground. A writer puts down the words, and a reader interprets the words, and every reader will read a book differently. I love that.

Garth Stein

And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.

Cornelia Funke

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.