"Brodsky believed that a translator must replicate the exact meter and rhyme of the original: “verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free verse.” (...) Few translations in any century could be called “successful reinventions”—or what I would call great translations. (...) By translating, we learn how the limits of our minds can be stretched to absorb the foreign, and how thereby we are able to make our language beautiful in a new way. (...) Maybe we are best served when the translator is not a scholar but a plunderer, taking what he or she needs from the original and flinging aside the rest." - Amira

"As Pound puts it in “How to Read,” “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translation.” Maybe our affinity for translation has to do with the fact that reading English is already a matter of translating, internally, between its Anglo-Saxon and Latinate elements. To appreciate Shakespeare, in particular, requires this sort of quasi-bilingualism: “No; this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red,” says Lady Macbeth, and the contrast between “incarnadine” and “red” brings home the disparity between the rhetoric of blood and its reality. (...)" - Amira

"50% of all the books in translation worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English. And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%." - Amira