A Quote by Siri Hustvedt

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind. — © Siri Hustvedt
Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
Sometimes I scrape off a lot. You have on the floor, like cow dung in the field, this big glob of paint... and it's just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then I look back at the canvas, and it's not inert - it's active, moving and living.
I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.
The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.
I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.
It's a matter of seeing the original meaning of all things. The world is full of all kinds of meanings. But our minds are so fettered by the lies and falsehoods they make for themselves, that they cannot see the beauty, goodness, or truth of those meanings. Only a mind that has become free can see such things.
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
Where names of people or places would mean little to a contemporary reader, I figured "translation errors" could create interesting new meanings.
What we want now is an immense awakening of Râjasika energy, for the whole country is wrapped in the shroud of Tamas. The people of this land must be fed and clothed-must be awakened -must be made more fully active. Otherwise they will become inert, as inert as trees and stones. So, I say, eat large quantities of fish and meat, my boy!
Everything is perception. A hallucination is a perception of a certain reality. It is a perception of a certain state of mind.
Reading is not an operation performed on something inert but a relationship entered into with another vital being.
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.
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