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T Quotes

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All T Quotes

“Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.”

“Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.”

“Translators build the bridges. The chasm between languages is a deep ravine of silence. So what can we do but trust that the translators' bridges are sturdy, will carry the weight of meaning from one side of the ravine to the other? But all these bridges are faulty. Hitches and chinks because one language cannot cross over to another language unaltered and unflawed.”

“Transmit your vision emotionally by gaining credibility, demonstrating passion, establishing relationships and communicating a felt need. Transmit it logically by confronting reality, formulating strategy, accepting responsibility, celebrating victory and learning from defeat.”

“Transmogrification—that’s the right word. It’s been on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite catch it. It’s a cumbersome word. It rolls through your mouth and then staccatos onto the floor in chunks of unnecessary syllables, like echoes of a thought already gone. It is a transformation, a metamorphosis that occurred not because I’d changed but because the rest of the world had.”

“Transneft is the world's largest pipeline company and moves oil all over Russia. Needless to say, it is state owned. In the mid-2000s it undertook the huge project of constructing an oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. Any construction project of that size is guaranteed first and foremost to involve a whole lot of embezzlement. Even if it gets completed, such a mega-project will not be finished on time; it will be done shoddily and against regulations; and a large chunk of the budget will be misappropriated. And that is exactly what happened. This was obvious to everyone, including the government, and in 2008 Transneft was audited by the Accounts Chamber, a special auditing department of the state. Scandalously, the results were kept secret at the request of Transneft itself. I went to great lengths to get my hands on this secret report and finally succeeded. I was appalled. The report's 150 pages drily laid out, with numbers and analysis, the fact that everything that could have been plundered had been. Construction costs had been inflated many times over, fly-by-night offshore companies had been selected as contractors, tenders and bidding had been conducted with wholly incredible irregularities, and the documentation relating to them had been destroyed in order to conceal what had been going on. The report was not the theorizing of experts or posts in a blog on the internet but rather an official report by the Accounts Chamber. The total amount embezzled in the course of the pipeline project was some $4 billion, "1,100 rubles stolen from every adult in Russia,' as I wrote in LiveJournal at the time. It was a huge scandal. The head of the state corporation at the time was, and to the present day still is, Nikolai Tokarev, an ex-KGB officer and a very close buddy of Putin's who had shared an office with him at the Soviet KGB residency in Dresden. Tokarev, an extremely private person, eventually spoke out. He accused me of being an opportunist and claimed I was "licked by Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute." And she, he claimed, virulently hated Russia. I ridiculed their understanding of the world, which had changed not a jot since the days of their youth and the Cold War. Almost immediately after publication of my investigation, an examination of the Kirovles case began in Kirov Region. It was in fact a reexamination, because I had already been investigated when I was working as Belykh's adviser. The police had unearthed nothing illegal then, and the episode was quickly forgotten. This now was evidently an attempt to prevent my returning to Russia, which was an option I did not for a moment contemplate. For several months I had been some homesick that I was devouring sorrel borscht in my dreams. The four of us packed our bags and flew back to Moscow. A new phase of my life had begun: every time I returned home, I wondered whether I would be arrested at the border.”