In translation

Featuring work by Lydia Davis, Amy Gerstler, Ilan Stavans, Terese Svoboda, Harry Mathews, Burton Raffel, Michael Anania, Lore Segal, Geoffrey O'Brien, Lynne Tillman, and others. Including translations from Chinese, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, and French.

The world is a mask. Lakes are moved from one place to another and cars enter the city just as the shop lights go on so that one form of glitter can lose itself in another.

--Geoffrey O'Brien

I learned tone first. Mom at the phone, Hello? Is not Mom a minute later, Go to bed. Then I learned the important foreign foods, eclair, spaghetti, and soup de jour, the last no one orders because there's nothing today about the translation, it's leftovers.

--Terese Svoboda

The translator who had been prepared to crack one code and replace it with another had better be aware that he or she is riding a wave. The notions of fidelity and music remain constant, but each age fabricates them and projects them onto the past, like a lover reading eternal truths in the loved one's nervous tics.

--D. Nurske

I believe that while translation is an ill-fated endeavor, we are all improved by it. Every communication is a form of misunderstanding, isn't it? And the act of translation only aggravates the situation.

--Ilan Stavans

Music is a self-contained language, often powerful and moving, but perhaps beyond translation. Saxophonist Joshua Redman [quotes]Matt Glaser: `Music expresses things that cannot be expressed any other way. When you attempt to find language to describe that, the words fall short.'

--Walter Cummins

--If a cop calls you, what does he say?

--What do you mean, what does he say?

--I mean, how does he say he's a policeman? What's the official way to do it?

--Lynne Tillman

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