The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.
--
Problems of translation (1955)Vladimir Nabokov
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The essence of art can never change. I'm convinced you can't talk about art. At best, you will have a translation, a poetic paraphrase, & as for that I'll leave that to the poets. 'New Program - Kunst & Kunstler Berlin 1914
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Literal Translation: A firm fortress is our God,
a good defense and weapon.
He frees us from all need,
that has struck us.Martin Luther
It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.
Jonathan Safran Foer
I would rather have been a French peasant and worn wooden shoes; I would rather have lived in a hut, with a vine growing over the door and the grapes growing and ripening in the autumn sun; I would rather have been that peasant, with my wife by my side and my children upon my knees, twining their arms of affection about me; I would rather have been that poor French peasant and gone down at last to the eternal promiscuity of the dust, followed by those who loved me; I would a thousand times rather have been that French peasant than that imperial personative of force and murder; and so I would —ten thousand thousand times.
Robert G. Ingersoll
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
John Millington Synge
Nabokov, Vladimir
Nadal, Rafael
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