A Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

I want my words to survive translation. — © Kazuo Ishiguro
I want my words to survive translation.
I want my words to survive translation. I know when I write a book now I will have to go and spend three days being intensely interrogated by journalists in Denmark or wherever. That fact, I believe, informs the way I write - with those Danish journalists leaning over my shoulder.
A translation is no translation unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.
I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
In its happiest efforts, translation is but approximation, and its efforts are not often happy. A translation may be good as translation, but it cannot be an adequate reproduction of the original.
The oldest cliché in the world is about "what's lost in translation," but you don't very often read much intelligent about what's gained by translation, and the answer is everything. Our language is a compendium of translation.
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That's what their substance is.
Many people do not know that Jesus did not speak Latin or English or Hebrew; he spoke Aramaic. But nobody knows that language. So we're talking about the Bible itself being a translation of a translation of a translation. And, in reality, it has affected people's lives in history.
In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.
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.
I want as many people to see the show [Hamilton] in its musical theater form as possible before it's translated, and whether it's a good act of translation or a bad act of translation, it's a leap, and very few stage shows manage the leap successfully.
And I'm convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can work with the unions because the unions want to survive. If they are confronted simply with the question: "Do you want this company to survive or do you want it to be broken up?" they will listen. It's their livelihood.
I want you to understand the words. I want you taste the words. I want you to love the words. Because the words are important. But they're only words. You leave them on the paper and you take the thoughts and put them into your mind and then you as an actor recreate them, as if the thoughts had suddenly occurred to you.
Truth lives in the spaces between words. It defies translation.
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