QuoteProject
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
Anne Michaels
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote suggests that experiencing poetry in translation diminishes the full beauty and intimacy of the original language.

Anne Michaels' quote metaphorically compares reading a poem in translation to kissing a woman through a veil, emphasizing that just as a veil obscures the full experience of a kiss, translation can obscure the depth, nuance, and emotional resonance of the original poem. The idea is that certain nuances and feelings are lost when art is filtered through another language, making the experience less genuine or powerful than it could be.

Themes

PoetryTranslationArtLanguageIntimacy

In practice

Example use cases

In a literary discussion about the beauty of original works.

More from Anne Michaels

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne MichaelsRead
When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary: a fork, a mattress, a clean shirt, a book. Not to mention such things that can make one weep: an orange, meat and vegetables, hot water. There was no ordinariness to return to, no refuge from the blinding potency of things, an apple screaming its sweet juice.
Anne MichaelsRead
If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.
Anne MichaelsRead
Long after you’ve forgotten someone’s voice, you can still remember the sound of their happiness or their sadness. You can feel it in your body.
Anne MichaelsRead
Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
Anne MichaelsRead
There's a moment when love makes you believe in death for the first time. You recognize the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child. All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.
Anne MichaelsRead

Similar quotes

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
Anton ChekhovRead
Such labour'd nothings, in so strange a style, Amaze th' unlearn'd and make the learned smile.
Alexander PopeRead
Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.
Alberto GiacomettiRead
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
Patti SmithRead
When you're a performer, of course you want an audience, but it's very, very different from courting fame.
Cate BlanchettRead
That's what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about.
Ornette ColemanRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.