A Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote Topics

Answer Anything Anything Else Art Art Of Writing Boat Canned Deep Deep Sea Die Eaten Else Entirely Felt Get Ideas Increasingly Itself Like Metaphor More Mysterious Nets Original Other Sandwiches Sea Shining Source Suppose Swim Swings Text Than Them Translation Words Writing

Quote Author

Ursula K. Le Guin
American - Novelist
October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018

Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else

Ursula K. Le Guin

When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All you can do is to fail in the least egregious way possible.

Jay L. Garfield

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

John Fowles

Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.

Lawrence Venuti

I go through the text making sure I haven't used any big words. If I find any fancy adjectives have crept in, I replace them with small words like 'nice' and 'big'. I've liked these words ever since I was told not to use them in English class at school. After that, I check that the sentences are short so as people won't get confused and I shorten all the chapters so they won't get bored. I can't read anything complicated these days, my attention span is too short. Everyone else probably feels the same.

Martin Millar

The people I've met -- obviously, the people I'm going to meet after concerts are people that bother to hang around and there's going to be more of a chance of things translating to them because they're going to take more time over it, if they're going to wait around to meet us. But so far, it does seem as if things written down are translating into people actually buying it, that kind of way.

James Dean Bradfield

It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.

Phil Klay

I'm more interested in moving toward writing stories - thinking about the graphic novel form, and just something more long-form. I did a lot of literary translation in college. Translation is an art. But for sure writing has always been a part of how I think through my ideas.

Chitra Ganesh

Almost anything can be stretched to serve more people by being added to a white sauce or canned gravy or undiluted or very slightly diluted canned soup and served over noodles or rice. With chops or chocolate eclairs, however, the only solution is to claim you don't like them.

Jo Coudert

My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.

Ken Liu

Writing by myself, I spread that out more. I'll spend more time on a song then. I'm more critical about it, because there's no one else in the room to tell me, 'That's really not translating. I'm not getting what you're saying.' So, I'm constantly rewriting it, thinking, 'No, that's fine,' and going back.

Hunter Hayes

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it - for ourselves and others.

Twyla Tharp

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Iris Murdoch

I'm always in awe of people who are artists in their fields - people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they've created value in the world.

Kevin Systrom

I’m always in awe of people who are artists in their fields – people who understand that simply by taking ideas and translating them into reality, they’ve created value in the world.

Kevin Systrom

Danger Mouse is now working on a bunch of other records, translating his ideas about remixing into all sorts of other projects.