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Willis Barnstone Quotes

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Willis Barnstone Quotes

“What good is life when golden love is gone? Frankly, I would rather be dead than ignore a girl's warm surrender, her soft arms in bed at night, the lovely flower of youth that all women and men desire! When old age comes a man feels feeble and ugly and crawls under a crushing sorrow. He loses the simple joy of looking at the sun. Children despise him. He is repulsive to young women—in this sad blind alley which God has made of old age.”

Willis BarnstoneMimnermos
Author:Mimnermos
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“In the words of Phokylides, the tribes of women come in four breeds: bee, bitch and grimy sow, and sinewy mate with draping mane. The mare is healthy, swift, roundly built and on the loose. The monster-looking sow is neither good nor rotten, and the bristling bitch lies snapping at the leash. Yes, the bee is best: a whizz at cleaning, trim and good in cooking. My poor friend, I tell you, for a bright, balmy marriage, pray for a bee.”

Willis BarnstonePhokylides
Author:Phokylides
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“A. What are you mooning about? B. I am in love. A. With whom? B. A virgin. A. Is she good looking? B. Perfectly exquisite. A. Where did you meet her? B. At a dinner party. I found her lying on the same couch with me. A. You think you'll get in? B. Yes, yes, my friend, but I don't wish to broadcast it. Actually I want it to be nice and discrete. A. You mean you want to avoid marriage. B. My friend, I found out she isn't worth a dime. A. You know this already. You are not in love, dear friend. You are lying. How can your heart be madly in love when it calculates so well?”

Willis BarnstoneAgathias Scholastikos
Author:Agathias Scholastikos
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“Ideally, poetry in translation should one day lead a reader to a reading of the poem in the original tongue. The poem in its native phonemes, we often forget, was primarily a poem, and a good one, presumably, if chosen for translation. A poem in translation should be faithful, if to anything, to this primary quality of the original—that of its being an effective poem.”

PoetryWillis BarnstoneTranslation
Book:Ancient Greek Lyrics
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“Many banal ideas are commonly held about the disadvantages of poetry in translation—this despite the modern additions to our language of verse translations by Lattimore, Fitts, Fitzgerald, Wilbur, Lowell, or Auden. Poems may be poorly translated, as they may have been poorly written originally, but they are not necessarily poorer or better than the original—though the translator must secretly and vainly aim for the later. The quality of the poem in translation will depend on the translator's skill in writing poetry in his own language in the act of translating. If he is T. S. Eliot translating Saint-Jean Perse or Mallarmé translating Poe or the scholars of the King James Version translating the psalms, the result may indeed be superior—or at the very least equal. Only one thing is certain: the poem in translation will be different. The translator's task, then, is to produce a faithful forgery. The quality and resemblance of the new product to the old lies somewhere between such fidelity and fraud.”

PoetryWillis BarnstoneTranslation
Book:Ancient Greek Lyrics
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“My child, deep-thundering Zeus controls the end of all that is, disposing as he wills. We who are mortals have no mind; we live like cattle, day to day, knowing nothing of god's plans to end each one of us. Yet we are fed by hope and faith to dream impossible plans. Some wait for a day to come, others watch the turning of years. No one among the mortals feels so broken as not to hope in coming time to fly home rich to splendid goods and lands. Yet before he makes his goal, odious old age lays hold of him first. Appalling disease consumes another. Some are killed in war where death carries them under the dark earth. Some drown and die under the myriad waves when a hurricane slams across the blue salt water cracking their cargo ship. Others rope a noose around their wretched necks and choose to die, abandoning the sun of day. A thousand black spirits waylay man with unending grief and suffering. If you listen to my counsel, you won't want the good things of life; not batter your heart by torturing your skull with cold remorse.”

Willis BarnstoneSemonides
Author:Semonides
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“Discussion of translations of poetry usually confuses kind with value. One type of translation is thought to be intrinsically superior to others, be it free translation, close translation, poetry after, imitation, metaphrase, paraphrase, etc. In the critic’s mind, the quality of a translation often depends on how closely it conforms to his own preferred method. This error of descriptive rather than evaluative criticism—where kind determines value—probably occurs more often in regard to poetry in translation than in any other form of literary criticism. But in the end, method is secondary, and determines neither the virtues nor sins of a poem. The translator need only clearly and honestly indicate his method—whatever it is—and then be judged, not on this choice, but on the quality of the new poem. If the new poem is good, the translator as artist will be performing his ancient function of retelling, in his own form, a given content he has overheard from the immediate or the distant past.”

PoetryWillis BarnstoneTranslation
Author:Willis Barnstone
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“But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminationswere translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us. In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.”

PoetryWillis BarnstoneTranslation
Book:Ancient Greek Lyrics
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“But it is said that certain memorable lines or phrases cannot be expressed in any other language. Yet it should also be said that while at times we must lose, at others we gain, and the good translator will take advantage of the text, improving upon the weaker lines of the original, while doing his best with the best. More important, it is forgotten that translation provides an opportunity for languages to interact upon each other, for one tongue to alter and enrich the possibilities of expression in another. In the past some translated works have changed both literary language and tradition: notably the Petrarchan sonnet, Luther's Bible, Judith Gautier's haiku. Milton went as naturally to the King James Version for vocabulary as Shakespeare turned to Holinshed for plots; when Rimbaud's Illuminations were translated into English, the tradition of our literature was expanded to the extent that diction and subject never before found in English were presented to us. In a word, the quality of a work in translation is dependent on the translator's skills. His forgery is not necessarily better or worse than the original or than other works in his own language; it is only necessarily different—and here the difference, if new and striking, may extend the verbal and thematic borders of his own literature. And as a corollary to his work the new poem may also be seen as an essay into literary criticism, a reading, a creative explication de texte.”

PoetryWillis BarnstoneTranslation
Book:Ancient Greek Lyrics
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