Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne MichaelsRead
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that experiencing poetry in translation diminishes the full beauty and intimacy of the original language.
Anne Michaels' quote metaphorically compares reading a poem in translation to kissing a woman through a veil, emphasizing that just as a veil obscures the full experience of a kiss, translation can obscure the depth, nuance, and emotional resonance of the original poem. The idea is that certain nuances and feelings are lost when art is filtered through another language, making the experience less genuine or powerful than it could be.
Themes
PoetryTranslationArtLanguageIntimacy
In practice
Example use cases
In a literary discussion about the beauty of original works.
More from Anne Michaels
All quotes →When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.
Anne MichaelsRead
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne MichaelsRead
Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.
Anne MichaelsRead
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
Anne MichaelsRead
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
Anne MichaelsRead
Similar quotes
Part of any book is establishing the rules at the end of the world. My first book, 'The Intuitionist,' takes place in an alternative world where elevator inspectors are important, so you have to establish rules, and part of that is, How do people talk? How do they behave?
Colson WhiteheadRead
I often make films about subjects I don't really know much about. Maybe it's laziness, but I don't go in there having done a tonne of research; the research happens while I'm making the film.
Asif KapadiaRead
The moon was sharp enough to draw blood from a stone
Tom WaitsRead
If you had a sign above every studio door saying ‘This Studio is a Musical Instrument’ it would make such a different approach to recording.
Brian EnoRead
History is my passion. So I write what I love to read. I find that if I combine history with a strong, sensual romance, it is like a one-two punch. The reader doesn't want the history without the romance, and of course the heavier the history, the more it has to be leavened with a sensual, all-consuming love story.
Virginia HenleyRead
Adornment, what a science! Beauty, what a weapon! Modesty, what elegance!
Coco ChanelRead