David Bellos Quotes

United Kingdom, Translator
1945

David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos is Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University in the United States. He was director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication from its inception in 2007 until July 1, 2019.

Also known as Biographer

Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain.

David Bellos
- Brain
- Creative
- Valuable
The practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different: we speak different tongues, and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same - that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist. Nor could anything we would like to call social life. Translation is another name for the human condition.

David Bellos

In painting as in prose, a good eye is not enough to tell you whether what you see is real or fake.

David Bellos
- Real
- Painting
- Enough