Translators From England

"His golden locks time hath to silver turned; O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing! His youth ’gainst time and age hath ever spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by encreasing."

"His helmet now shall make a hive for bees, And lovers’ songs be turned to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees, And feed on prayers, which are old age’s alms."

"The body is the outermost layer of the mind."

"Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute."

"Whoever dies with the most stuff wins."

"I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back."

"The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken."

"Lunatics are writers whose works write them."

"What is this thing, "imagination?" A muscle that can be "forced" or "stretched"? Or something immune to the ethos of ganbaru [grit it out, or strive for one's best]? Like the relativist's view of light, it is both wave and particle, depending on what you want it to be. The verb "to imagine" is both active and passive, as in "Steve imagined his future," and "Such a future was never imagined." So, I work on my novel by imagining the world of 18th-century Nagasaki and its people and their fears and desires, as an act of will, and a lot of will is involved, believe me. However, I could ganbaru until I'm blue in the face. If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. (...) Imagination is what makes art fertile."

"As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens."

"Right now I’m working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn’t give too many details or the next thing you know it’s on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I’ll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache."

"What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell."

"Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat."

"Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?""

"One thing that happens with gothic fiction, and I think the person who explores this most keenly is probably Angela Carter in her collection of retold fairy tales, is that gothic fiction seems to echo certain fairy tales...She pulls at these threads that fairy tales have, these elements that they have that we don’t think about much."

"A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters."

"Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them."

"My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis."

"Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual."

"Throwing open the door, she brings forth the veritable queen of all the souffles, that spreads its archangelic wings over the entire kitchen as it leaps upwards from the dish in which the force of gravity alone confines it."

"Women's sexy underwear is a minor but significant growth industry of late-twentieth-century Britain in the twilight of capitalism."

"Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people."

"I'm interested in the division that Judeo-Christianity has made between human nature and animal nature. None of the other great faiths in the world have got quite that division between us and them. None of the others has made this enormous division between birds and beasts who, as Darwin said, would have developed consciences if they'd had the chance, and us. I think it's one of the scars in Western Europe. I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates."

"Her writing life began in her early 20s in , where she and her first husband, Paul Carter, were part of the folk scene. The and her early novels are set against a landscape more postwar than pop, of derelict houses and bombsites turning to waste ground. The first, ', came out in 1966. Two more followed, establishing her as a promising writer, albeit not one likely to prop up the literary establishment. Shy, with a slight stammer, she veered from gauche to wildly outspoken. After a reading by in 1968 she buttonholed AS Byatt, who recalled: “This very disagreeable woman stomped up to me and she said, ‘My name’s Angela Carter … and I wanted to stop and tell you that the sort of thing you’re doing is no good at all.’” The “sort of thing” she meant was the in which “people drink tea and commit adultery”."

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth."

"Masturbation is the thinking man's television."

"Brecht always liked people to be aware that they were in a theatre. I said to him more than once, but Brecht, what makes you think they think they're anywhere else?"

"Here's the lily, here the rose Her full chalice shall disclose; Here's narcissus wet with dew, Windflower and the violet blue. Wear the garland I have made; Crowned with it, put pride away; For the wreath that blooms must fade; Thou thyself must fade some day, Rhodocleia."

"Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun! It's a quarter to five; Thank God I'm alive! Now the hum of the hive Of the world has begun, Thank God I'm alive In the light of the Sun!"

"Lord Saint-Edith said he couldn't understand people thinking Bacon had written Shakespeare's plays. If they said Shakespeare had written the works of Bacon as a pastime he could understand it."

"[T]here is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious, and you do not play them to enjoy yourself."

"Whoever one is, and wherever one is, one is always in the wrong if one is rude."

"In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast between the genius which does what it must and the talent which does what it can."

"A good play is a play which, when acted upon the boards, makes an audience interested and pleased. A play that fails in this is a bad play."

"If you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it."

"I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave. I've a pain in my head, I wish I was dead. In a coffin of lead— With the Wise and the Brave— I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave."

"Learn just enough of the subject [metaphysics] to enable your mind to get rid of it."

"Research! Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value."

"We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?"

"Divines have lately discovered how to accept the critical results which shocked readers of Essays and Reviews, and yet to accept the whole theory of priestly magic. The compromise may result in the enslavement of reason instead of the neutralising of superstition. I know not what may be the result to the Church of England, but the enterprise attempted in the best possible faith by Jowett and his friends, seems to be injurious to the higher interests of intellectual honesty. It was a hopeless endeavour to hide irreconcilable contrasts and pretend that they did not exist"

"Young men, as a rule, like a leader who has some distinct aim, good or bad, and if Jowett were to be judged by that test one would say that no one of his time was less qualified to be a leader. To a distinct view of the importance of some solution he seems to have joined the profound conviction that no conceivable solution would hold water. "He stood," says one of his pupils, in a rather different sense, "at the parting of many ways," and he wrote, one must add, "No thoroughfare" upon them all."

"The [Oxford tourist] guide would begin: "This, ladies and gentlemen, is Balliol College, one of the very holdest in the huniversity, and famous for the herudition of its scholars. The 'ead of Balliol College is called the Master. The present Master of Balliol is the celebrated Professor Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek. Those are Professor Jowett's study-windows, and there" (here the ruffian would stoop down, take up a handful of gravel and throw it against the panes, bringing poor Jowett, livid with fury, to the window) "ladies and gentlemen, is Professor Benjamin Jowett himself.""

"Mr Jowett was always intent on improving his own character for the sake of his undergraduates. This is very rare in middle aged men and still more so in elderly and old men... [Jowett possessed] more character than any body I ever knew... He mastered life, life did not master him: that was what the spirit of life was in him. He was master even when most depressed."

"He seemed to have taken the measure not merely of all opinions, but of all possible ones, and to have put the last refinements on literary expression. The charm of that was enhanced by a certain mystery about his own philosophic and other opinions. You know at that time his writings were thought by some to be obscure. These impressions of him had been derived from his Essays on St. Paul's Epistles, which at that time were much read and pondered by the more intellectual sort of undergraduates."

"A disciple of Socrates, he valued speech more highly than any other gift; yet he was always hampered by a conscious imperfection and by a difficulty in sustaining and developing his thoughts in society. Such was my diagnosis of his manner."

"The young Housman wrote home that he had absented himself from Jowett's lectures in disgust at the Professor's gross ignorance of Greeek. Here we must make allowance for a juvenile excess of rigour; but any page of the original edition of Jowett's famous translation of Plato will supply some evidence in favour of Housman's stern judgment. Even if one could forgive Jowett's deficiencies as a scholar and his reluctance to take action to amend them, what can we say of his openly expressed aversion to research, of his opposition to every scheme calculated to advance sound learning in the University, of his not only failing to perform what are usually held to be the duties of a Professor, but actually coming forward as the main adversary of the interests he might have been expected to protect? Yet it is impossible to ignore the distinctive contribution to the traditions of the Chair made by this remarkable man. The Plato and the Thucydides are defective in point of scholarship; but as literature they have great merits, and they reached, and still reach, a wide public."

"Jowler [Jowett] preached yesterday in Chapel amidst intense excitement, no people in Chapel. He looked so fatherly and beautiful and brought out the best bell-like silvern voice with quite rich tones that he had hitherto hidden in the depth of his stomach, and preached the most lovely little practical sermon in a quite perfect style with the most wonderful grace. I have only said all this laud in anticipation of having to confess that though I felt how beautiful it was in its way, it was most unsatisfying to me. It was just Platonism flavoured with a little Christian charity: Christianity is gutted by him: it becomes perfectly meaningless, if it is only an attempt to take some useful moral hints from just what happens to strike you in a very good, "perhaps I may be excused in saying" a Divine life. He is perfectly self-sufficient; self-dependent, without any consciousness of anything beyond a certain human weakness in carrying out his ideal; there is not an atom of the feeling of prayer, of communication with God, of reliance on any one but self. He even begs pardon for using as vague an expression as "sharing in the Spirit of God." I admire the Symposium with all my heart and soul; but I must have something more to have brought God down to death to procure for me."

"His edition of St. Paul's Epistles made him an arch-heretic in the eyes of the High Church party, and his simultaneous appointment to the Greek Professorship gave the chance, of which its members were foolish enough to avail themselves, of putting him in the position of a martyr of free thought. His share in the Essays and Reviews (1860) made him a representative man in a wider sphere. Though we have now got to the stage of affecting astonishment at the sensation produced by the avowal of admitted truths in that work, nobody who remembers the time can doubt that it marked the appearance of a very important development of religious and philosophical thought. The controversy raised by Essays and Reviews even distracted men for a time from the far more important issues raised by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species."

"Mr Jowett's forte is mental philosophy. How has this or that metaphysical question presented itself to different minds, or to the same mind at different times? Under what contradictory aspects may a particular religious sentiment or moral truth be viewed? What phenomena does an individual mind exhibit at different stages in its growth? What contrasts do we find in the ancient and modern world of thought? This is the class of questions Mr Jowett delights to ask and to answer. He is strongly negative. He is fond of dwelling on contradictions rather than resemblances. He is content with stating a difficulty without attempting a solution of it."