And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

“i think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. the poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’s composing in. word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and without any one of them the whole thing falls apart. that’s why shelley writes that translating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible. so the translator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, to convey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange the translated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. the poet runs untrammeled across the meadow. the translator dances in shackles.”

but if the world was an abstract object for them, it was even more abstract to him, for me had no stake in any of these matters.

languages aren’t just made of words. they’re modes of looking at the world. they’re the keys to civilization. and that’s knowledge worth killing for. — babel, by r.f. kuang