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Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

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Linda Murphy Marshall

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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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“Why did she keep these random items? How did they make the cut? Maybe she felt it had to be her decision what to keep, what to discard, just as it's my turn now, my decision as I go room to room, playing God with my parents' possessions. (148)”

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“When you're translating a document or a speech, if you don't have all the words, you don't have all the meaning. I'd only had my words thus far, my thoughts, not hers. That had given me an incomplete picture, one with pockets of omissions… (154)”

GriefMemoirGrief And LossFamily RelationshipsInheritanceGrief QuotesTranslationGrief And Loss QuotesFamily ConflictTranslation Quotes
Book:Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery
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