“All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something”

“Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.”

“The only reason I lost, the only reason I failed to get what I want, is because the monster is me, there's no difference between us. It makes all the moves, calls all the shots, while I'm just along for the ride, with no idea how to pull the brakes or get off.”

“When I am with you, we stay up all night.When you're not here, I can't go to sleep.Praise God for those two insomnias!And the difference between them.”

“Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.”

“The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee.”