You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Interpretation
Translations capture the evolution of a text as it shifts through languages.
Jorge Luis Borges highlights the idea that translations are not merely direct conversions of words from one language to another, but they represent a nuanced transformation that reflects cultural and contextual changes. Each translation offers a unique perspective on the original work and reveals how language influences interpretation over time, making each version a valuable record of how the text has evolved.
In practice
In a speech about the significance of literature, one could say, 'As Borges once noted, translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.'
You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
Only in the mystery novel are we delivered final and unquestionable solutions. The joke to me is that fiction gives you a truth that reality can't deliver.
The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.
I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.
I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.
Look, man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.