Language

"Surely in a matter of this kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that we have not lived in vain, that we may leave some impress of ourselves on the sands of time."

"Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time"

"Those that say yes are rewarded by the adventure they have. Those that say no are rewarded by the safety they attain."

"Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."

"After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun."

"Yes is the answer and you know that for sure. Yes is surrender, you got to let it, you got to let it go…"

"Unschuld ist das Kind und Vergessen, ein Neubeginnen, ein Spiel, ein aus sich rollendes Rad, eine erste Bewegung, ein heiliges Ja-sagen."

"i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes"

"My intention was to give a general outline, to sketch a general division and, as it were, a provisional plan of a domain that has not been studied so far and which should be the result of work for many generations of linguists. The reader is therefore requested to consider this book a simple introduction to the science which I propose to call semantics."

"[ Semantics can be defined as] the science of the meanings of words, [the central issue of which is] the problem of the relationship between words and designata."

"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them."

"Semantics (semasiology) is a branch of linguistics. The questions which are of particular interest in this connection are — with what is that branch of linguistics concerned, and in what does it see the distinction between itself and the semantic problems found in contemporary logic."

""What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved."

"It was Thomas Hobbes who, anticipating semantics, pointed out that words are counters, not coins; that the wise man looks through them to reality."

"Who Are the Semanticists? To answer this question, let us go to the writings of those who make frequent references to semantics or to equivalent terms which have to do with the study of meaning. We find that a number of prominent thinkers have occupied themselves with this study. In England these include Whitehead, Russell, Ogden, Richards, Ayer, and others; in Austria (later scattered, fleeing from fascism), a group of writers who called themselves the Vienna Circle, which included Carnap and Frank (now in in the United States), Wittgenstein (now in England), and Neurath (deceased); the United States is represented by Charles Morris, and Poland by Tarski and Korzybski (deceased), both of whom emigrated to the United States."

"Vagueness and vacillation are not devices of timidity; they are the honest result of the writer's own mental character, which adapts him to be the instructor and the favourite of “the general reader.” For the most part, the general reader of the present day does not exactly know what distance he goes; he only knows that he does not go “too far.” Of any remarkable thinker, whose writings have excited controversy, he likes to have it said that “his errors are to be deplored,” leaving us not too certain what those errors are; he is fond of what may be called disembodied opinions, that float in vapoury phrase above all systems of thought or action; he likes an undefined Christianity which opposes itself to nothing in particular, an undefined education of the people, an undefined amelioration of all things: in fact, he likes sound views—nothing extreme, but something between the excesses of the past and the excesses of the present. This modern type of the general reader may be known in conversation by the cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred statements: say that black is black, he will shake his head and hardly think it; say that black is not so very black, he will reply “Exactly.” He has no hesitation, if you wish it, even to get up at a public meeting and express his conviction that at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal; but, on the other hand, he would urge that the spirit of geometry may be carried a little too far. His only bigotry is a bigotry against a clearly defined opinion; not in the least based on a scientific scepticism, but belonging to a lack of coherent thought—a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing. The one thing he is staunch for is, the utmost liberty of private haziness."

"Ἐγὼ τὸ Ἄλφα καὶ τὸ Ὦ, ὁ πρῶτος καὶ ὁ ἔσχατος, ἡ ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ τέλος."

"By my life, this is my lady’s hand: these be her very C’s, her U’s, and her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s."

"In the placed I go there are things that I see That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z. I'm telling you this 'cause you're one of my friends. My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!"

"Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter!"

"The chief cause which made the fusion of the different elements of society so imperfect was the extreme difficulty which our ancestors found in passing from place to place. Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilisation of our species. Every improvement of the mean of locomotions benefits mankind mortally AND intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitated the interchange of the various productions of mature and artist, but rends to removed nationals and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the human family."

"A scholarship liked myself who is not a Sinologist and yet ventures the proposition that Chinese languages should be rewritten in the Greek alphabet (or "Romanized", to use the current term) is treading on uncharted territory (for him) and does so at his peril."

"The difficulties of interpretation were pointed out by Yāska in his Nirukta nearly 3,000 years ago: Sanskrit: tat ko vṛtraḥ?—meghaḥ iti nairuktāḥ, tvāṣṭro ‘suraḥ ity aitihāsikāḥ (Nirukta 2.16) English: “That (who) Vṛtra?”—“A cloud” says the narrator, “An asura, Tvaṣṭri’s [son]” say the story-tellers."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"How shall men meditate in that which they cannot understand? How shall they understand that which is kept close in an unknown tongue? [...] Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water."

"A scribe who does not know how to grasp the meaning -- from where will he produce a translation?"

"Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

"For Pound, translation opens up possibilities for creating a new compound out of old elements; for Nabokov it is a grudgingly admitted, inevitable evil."

"Traduzo, sim, mas fico cheia de mêdo de ler traduções que fazem de livros meus. Além de ter basntante enjôo de reler coisas minhas, fico também com mêdo do que o tradutor possa ter feito com um texto meu."

"A translation must speak for itself. As a rule, it only requires a commentary where it is not directly convincing, and where the translator does not feel secure."

"There exists a chance of every poem getting changed while reaching every reader. This ‘getting changed’ is a form of ‘getting translated’, in a way. So, every assimilation of any poem is a translation."

"Chance of source language influencing the target language and that of the translator intervening onto the style of original writer are major challenges in literary translation."

"In translation of poetry; there exists a possibility of components like imagination, art of wordplay, skill of constructing internal rhythm and expand of knowledge of the poet getting affected by the constraint and differentia of the translator."

"Whenever someone suggests "how much is lost in translation!" I want to say, "Perhaps but how much is gained!" A new world of readers, for one thing."

"-->* ...The literal translation, that is, of absolute fidelity to the literary form in which, within his language, the author expressed his thought, betrays and kills the translated work. The good translator must say (...) the same thing (...) but within the translator's language (...) only then will he really be translating what matters: the idea, the author's thought. Who seeks to translate the form (...) does not do translation. He does a horrible thing called transliteration (...) unintelligible..."

"A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him."

"Literal translation of poetry is in reality a solecism. You may construe your author, indeed, but if with some Translators you boast that you have left your author to speak for himself, that you have neither added nor diminished, you have in reality grossly abused him, and deceived yourself. Your literal translation can have no claim to the original felicities of expression; the energy, elegance, and fire of the original poetry. It may bear indeed a resemblance, but such a one as a corps in the sepulchre bears to the former man when he moved in the bloom and vigour of life.Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres——was the taste of the Augustan age. None but a poet can translate a poet."

"I think people who work on translation projects think that they're somehow peace negotiators because the belief is that we'll never stop killing one another until we understand and see one another as human beings. I think that's true."

"It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator. ... And the original is in the hands of the world."

"It is frustrating to be translating other people's autobiographies whilst mine is lying unpublished, banned by the Home Office."

"Translations [into the German language], even the best ones, proceed from a mistaken premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. ... The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue."

"In literary translations, it is this very articulation of expressions that matters the most to bring home to the readers the full essence of the original text in question."

"On translating text into the new language as it is in source language, there is a chance of it being emerged as an absurd sentence in the target language making no sense at all. In the attempt to make the translation meaningful to the target language, there exists a risk of the original work getting meddled by the translator’s style."

"Literary translation is not merely an act of picking words from one language and keeping it by dipping in the vessel of another language. Those words need to be rinsed, washed, carved and decorated as much as possible."

"The translator of a poem is only a transient mediator... in time all translations fall away, fade, become literary curiosities, time-bound and largely of scholarly rather than literary interest."

"A good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body."

"No man is capable of translating poetry, who, besides a genius to that art, is not a master both of his author's language and of his own; nor must we understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish, and as it were individuate him from all other writers. When we are come thus far it is time to look into ourselves, to conform our genius to his, to give his thought either the same turn, if our tongue will bear it, or, if not, to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy the substance."

"Many things which go under my name are badly translated from the German or are invented by other people."

"Nor ought a genius less than his that writ Attempt translation."

"I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original. The translator's ingenuity, indeed, in this case becomes itself a snare, and the readier he is at invention and expedient, the more likely he is to be betrayed into the widest departures from the guide whom he professes to follow."