“No one never really ‘heals’ from grief; one just learns to manage the pangs of it. Like a person would thicken the roof in the anticipation of hailstorms.”
Source: Songs of the Reed
“Unconditional love in my family was rare; you had to earn love, but it proved to be an elusive goal, the artist's vanishing point, unreachable in the distance. The more I tried to earn my parents' respect, the more it backfired, having the opposite effect (191).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Translating. It’s exhausting (166).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“I realize it has taken the death of both my parents for me to finally begin to see who I am, but not through their eyes. I’ll never forget them; my parents I have been in lockstep ever since I was young child, but their words drowned out my own voice. I’m starting to come into my own. (240)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“I'd been given a foreign text to decipher, but I couldn't even identify the language, much less the meaning behind the words; she was speaking in some code (229)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Words had a purpose. Language had a purpose; I’d wrongly assumed that my mother wouldn’t misuse it (229)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“Where wisdom is sought daily, victory is found easily.”
Source: A Manual for Victory
“Translation involves more than the deciphering of words, words strung together in sentences, in paragraphs, in dialogue, in the years of a life. After all, a machine can do that if you feed all the data into it. Translation also involves making sense of what’s left unspoken, those ellipses, blank spaces, the dot-dot-dots when you have to guess what’s happening in the person’s mind, what the silent messages mean. It calls for the translation of surrounding events, the cultural context, as well as the translation of nonverbal communication. What was being said through that certain look, that ever-so-tiny smile, that flash of a grimace? That spark of anger? Those sarcastic comments? Those prolonged silences? What did it all mean? (249)”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“The most difficult thing for me to translate to date, though, has been my own life (250).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
“We no longer had a lingua franca after we moved there. We consisted of six people, our own little Tower of Babel… Six people speaking many different languages, none of them mutually intelligible. Six people bumping into each other in the dark, no longer able to understand each other, wounding one other in the process (257).”
Source: Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery