Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as is possible, and moves the reader towards him: or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.
Interpretation
Translation involves a balance between maintaining the author's intent and making the text accessible to the reader.
Friedrich Schleiermacher's quote highlights the dual responsibility of a translator in literature. On one hand, the translator must strive to preserve the original author's voice and intent, ensuring that their message is conveyed as authentically as possible. On the other hand, the translator must also consider the reader's experience, adapting the text to be relatable and comprehensible without losing its essence. This duality underscores the complexity of translation as both an art and a craft.
In practice
In a discussion on how to approach literary translation, this quote can emphasize the balance required in the craft.
The first, that their pretensions to this possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant.
Whenever I find a spark of that hidden fire that will sooner or later consume the old and create the new, I am drawn to it with love and hope, regarding it as a sign of my future home.
The essence of the religious emotions consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good and pleasure or feeling.
The essence of religion consists in the feeling of an absolute dependence.
Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs.
The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
Samsara - our conditioned existence in the perpetual cycle of habitual tendencies and nirvana - genuine freedom from such an existence- are nothing but different manifestations of a basic continuum. So this continuity of consciousness us always present. This is the meaning of tantra.
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