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Quote by Gift Gugu Mona

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A Manual for Victory

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Gift Gugu Mona

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“A strangled, sobbing gasp choked Wendy as the world started to spin around her. She tried to breathe, to break through whatever hold this memory still had on her, but it was all she could do not to let herself go completely. Every piece of her was trapped in that day, silently screaming for her younger self not to abandon her mother in her last moments.”

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Book:The Rescue
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“I'm outside my parents' home in the aftermath of their deaths, waiting for my three siblings to arrive so we can go through it, room by room, object by object, memory by memory; decide what to keep, what to discard. Stepping out of my rental car, part of me feels like a trespasser now, while another part feels like I never left. (7)”

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Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
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“In addition to the physical aspects of the work, I'm here to recreate my own personal story, my own narrative. For years—a lifetime, really—when I thought about my life, I saw it through the lens of other people, usually my parents, sometimes my sib-lings. If they told me I was this, that, or the other type of person, I usually took their words at face value, even when the descriptions sounded negative, even when I fought their pronouncements. But translation is all about making decisions, hundreds, even thousands of decisions. Maybe a new way exists to look at myself, at my life. At long last, I’ll take those same words and events to come up with different meanings, different interpretations, ones I've reached on my own, stripping away others' interpretations of who I am. (9)”

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Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
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“The translator in me--always at work, even in English-wants to understand the intent of his words. This is where the meaning must lie, right? With the filters turned off, the translator's mind is unfettered by others' words, actions, or opinions, or even by their mere presence. (15)”

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Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
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“In my case, I felt like I'd been drowning in a sea of words, words that, more often than not, bore no resemblance to their dictionary definitions. What was the point of communicating if, inevitably, a subtext bubbled up, one I had trouble making sense of in my naïveté, in my confusion? What was the point if a word's meaning had been distorted to fit secret agendas, flip-flopped for unknown ulterior motives, withheld for other reasons? Translating what anyone said had become impossible for me, my work with languages, my love of words failing me when it came to my own family. All my dictionaries proved useless in trying to decipher a lifetime of communication fraught with subtexts buried beneath more subtexts. (134)”

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Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
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