Edith Grossman Quotes
Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
Edith Grossman
Quotes to Explore
People should be able to express their culture without getting into all that chauvinistic thing.
Irvine Welsh
The music is just so rich and part of the culture there. I suddenly felt like I needed to go on this mission to make sure we save New Orleans because - not that I can save anything - but it's so much part of what this country is, this whole mix of people coming together and doing this thing.
Harold Perrineau
I come from a country and also a continent whose identity is in the making. We're a very young culture, and I think that things are not yet crystallised.
Walter Salles
I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.
Salma Hayek
If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.
Eckhart Tolle
You don't have to spend much time in Shanghai before you start to get all existential about the meaning of authenticity. Did you know that Shanghai is building nine satellite towns, each designed to mimic the architecture and culture of a different country?
Patricia Marx
In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.
Abbas Kiarostami
Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - and you allow him to make war at pleasure.
Abraham Lincoln
To end the pervasive culture of sexual harassment, it can no longer be the norm that men look the other way. It only ends when men actively participate in ending it.
J. B. Pritzker
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
Garry Winogrand
It's not an accident that musicians become musicians and engineers become engineers: it's what they're born to do. If you can tune into your purpose and really align with it, setting goals so that your vision is an expression of that purpose, then life flows much more easily.
Jack Canfield
Giving up at something that no longer serves a purpose, or protects you, or helps you, isn't giving up at all, it's growing up.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Our self-esteem and conceit are European, but our culture and actions are Asiatic.
Anton Chekhov
I say to my industrialist friends, when you have guests from out of town, I don't care how important they are, you should feed them the essence of Italian culture: spaghetti, bread and olive oil.
Brunello Cucinelli
Kinsey was trying to study sex scientifically, get rid of the overlay of culture and religion.
Bill Condon
A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.
David Hume
Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.
Charles Eames
Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.
Mary Ellen Mark
Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers - poets, actors, journalists - they, as communities, embrace the meaning of what it is to be scientifically literate. They embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don't fight science and they don't fight technology.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.
T. S. Eliot
Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.
Edward T. Hall
'What are you - some kind of addict? Is this where you come to...'
Peter Greenaway
The soul is the form of the body.
Aristotle
Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.
Edith Grossman
