"Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?"
"Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one."
"Words tell stories. Specifically, the history of those words — how they came into use, and how their meaning morphed into what they mean today — tell us just as much about a people, if not more, than any other kind of historical artefact."
"The poet is free to say whatever he likes... Word choice, word order, sound — they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. The poet runs untrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles."
"The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch," Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. "Translated literally, it means 'sitting meat'. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done."
"We can think of etymology as an exercise in tracing how far a word has strayed from its roots. For they travel marvellous distances, both literally and metaphorically." — Typhoon: from Greek Typhon, to Arabic tūfān, to Portuguese, to China's shores, where táifēng — great wind — was already waiting. Words spread. Languages are only shifting sets of symbols, stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics."