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
The consumerist culture insists that swearing eternal loyalty to anything and anybody is imprudent, since in this world new glittering opportunities crop up daily.
Zygmunt Bauman
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 a very generous culture, American culture. I know you can't generalize 300 million people, but everyone I've met here has been so lovely to me.
Jacki Weaver
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
Terrorists are people, too - they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in 'Mao II' that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who 'alter the inner-life of the culture.' I thought that was marvellous!
Karan Mahajan
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
History is not usually what has happened. History is what some people have thought to be significant.
Idries Shah
I think Missy Elliot is pretty creative, I mean at least trying to take it to the future.
Keith Matthew Thornton
I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.
Alexi Zentner
I don't know if I would personally want to step in the cage and either have my face caved in or cave in somebody else's, but I've met some really beautiful and sensitive and morally pretty stout individuals who happen to be fighters. It's really awesome.
Matt Lauria
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
