translation quotes

A thing well said will be wit in all languages†though it may lose something in the translation.

-John Dryden
  An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,'The Wit of the  Ancients: The Universal'.

Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation.

- Robert Lee Frost
Quoted in Louis Untermeyer Robert Frost:  A Backward Look (1964).

Translation isthe paradigm, the exemplar of all writing† It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.

- Harry Burchell Mathews
  Country Cooking and Other Stories,'The Dialect of the Tribe'.

Pour e  crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e  crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a'   l'inventer puisqu'il existe de j a'   en chacun de nous, mais a'   le traduire. To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writerdoesnot needto invent becausethebook already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

- Marcel Proust
' 1927  A la recherche du temps perdu,'LeTemps retrouve ' .

The vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creations of a poet. 786 The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Defence of Poetry.