A Quote by Andre Naffis-Sahely
I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.
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Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison, and the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth - that when you really look closely, people are so strange and so complicated that they're actually beautiful. Possibly even me.
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
I come from a family of linguists. My maternal grandparents have been authors and translators.
You're collaborating with people you don't even know, when you're making a film. You're collaborating with people you've never seen. So, the collaborative process is very, very different than when you're collaborating on a record with the musicians you've worked with all your life.
Now for me, you're the irreplaceable one: I've never see you up so close before, and I do not understand you at all. You say sometimes I act like I don't see you? I don't even know where to look! Living with you around is like is like living with a permanent dazzle. The fact that you even like me, or look at me, or brush by me, or hug me, or hold me, is so surprising that after it's over I have to go back through it a dozen times in my head to savor it and try and figure out what it was like because I was too busy being astounded while it was happening.
There was - there still is - a big shortage of good Chinese-English literary translators. So for two years in London, I was stuck waiting, not writing, with several Chinese books I couldn't get translated. That's when I decided to write in English, since I had been living here and had decided to reconstruct my life here. Even if I wrote in broken English, it was better than getting bored and weary and bitter on the long queue of authors waiting to be translated by a stranger.
I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.
I've heard that some authors do dream their books and I would love that if it happened to me, but so far it hasn't. Sometimes I'll get a good idea during the night and if I don't write it down, I won't remember it the next morning.
My father had lived in the States in the 1960s for a while and came to love American Songbook material. Even today, he sometimes recognizes singers that I never even heard of, which is beautiful and inspiring.
Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.
Authors do this for a living, and if you take their work for nothing, you are depriving them of a living.
I'd like to be a director who gives my actors complete freedom while collaborating with them to find performances.
It took me a while to get over 'Highway'. I started living the character of 'Veera' very closely. I don't think I would be able to give so much to a character the way I did with her.
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you're near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly structured formality of casual civilized interaction, there's a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me. It doesn't have to be someone particularly nice. You don't have to like them. You don't even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.
Like a lot of us, sometimes I'm preaching to the choir, and sometimes my voice doesn't even get heard at all. Sometimes I think that what I'm writing now might not even have an impact for the next three or four generations. Sometimes I sit there and write, and I think, "It'll be two hundred years before they get what I'm writing about."
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