We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.
I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.
I don’t like pictures in books. I feel that the pictures diminish the words, and the words diminish the pictures, and it doesn’t work.
Reason and memory are nearly always at odds.
We hear things, but we can’t always see them, or, even if we do see them, we’re not sure that we’re seeing correctly. Hence: Invisible.
We are all aliens to ourselves, and if we have any sense of who we are, it is only because we live inside the eyes of others.
As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
I think that’s what turns young men and women into writers – the happiness you discover living in books.
Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.
Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see – they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.
Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.
Memory is the space in which a thing happens for a second time.
We all want to believe in impossible things, I suppose, to persuade ourselves that miracles can happen.
The truth of the story lies in the details.
It’s a mind going over things, revisiting things, maybe trying to refine the original perception. You have to keep going a thing over in order to make sense off it.
You’re too good for this world, and because of that the world will eventually crush you.
I haven’t done any translating for decades now. It’s something I did when I was young.
Libraries aren’t in the real world, after all. They’re places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In this way I can go on living on the moon for the rest of my life.
We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.