“Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.” Quote by Elliott Colla
“The stories that confirm that bigger story are brought in and easily digested. But there's another set of stories that are always there, which do not confirm, but which complicate and contradict what we think we already know. And I'm always attracted to that. There doesn't seem to be much of a market for it. Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.” ThinkingArtBookStyle Author:Elliott Colla
“Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.” ThinkingMovingSuccessfulStrangeFamiliarChineseTranslations Author:Elliott Colla
“In translation studies we talk about domestication - translation styles that make something familiar - or estrangement - translation styles that make something radically different. I use a lot of both in my translation, and modernism does both. For instance, if you look at the way James Joyce presents Ulysses, is that domesticating a classic? Think of it as an experiment in relation to a well-known text in another language.” ThinkingDifferentLanguageStudyStyleRelationFamiliarClassicTranslationsModernismJoyceUlyssesEstrangement Author:Elliott Colla
“Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.” ImportantNative Author:Robert Bringhurst
“Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.” LiteratureRussian Literature Author:Robert Bringhurst
“I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.” ThinkingDifferentCountryStrongMoonCurious Author:Isabelle Huppert
“I've done many, many French movies and many, many English movies. I think it frees something when you don't talk in your mother language, but I also think you withdraw something as well. I'm a French actress, and sometimes I speak in English-speaking roles. For me, being an actress was always being a traveler. It goes together.” ThinkingSometimesDoneTogetherMotherSpeakLanguageTraveler Author:Isabelle Huppert
“It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.” WorldMindHouseUnusualMind And Body Author:Robert Bringhurst
“A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.” WorldEmotionPerception Author:Robert Bringhurst
“In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.” WorldCharacterActionLiteratureIndividualNovelMythNativeImaginary Author:Robert Bringhurst