Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.
Anne MichaelsRead
Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.
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
All quotes →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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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