Books Quote by Paul Auster

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who…

— Paul Auster

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt,…

— Jose Saramago

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been…

— Katie Kitamura

What is the task of the translator? I think the task depends on the book and on the translator.

— Idra Novey

The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than…

— Dexter Filkins

A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

— Gregory Rabassa

All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, a chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.…

— John Donne

I've heard of translators collaborating closely with their authors, sometimes even living with them for a while, but that's not me.

— Andre Naffis-Sahely

I think that if you are sticking to the text, essentially, you're not trying to write your own version of it. I mean, of…

— Ann Goldstein

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators…

— Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

We are all mediators, translators.

— Jacques Derrida

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay…

— Mark Strand