“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”

“If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.”

“My books must be an absolute nightmare to translate. I wouldn't do it. I had a couple of them in Japanese some years ago and my wife met a Japanese woman who said that she had read the books. And she asked her what the translations were like. This woman said they were the worst translation she had ever read in her life. She said she didn't recognise the books when she finally read them in English.”

“A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.”

“Translators are like busy match-makers: they sing the praises of some half-veiled beauty, and extol her charms, and arouse an irresistible longing for the original.”

“It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.”

“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”

“Nor let the critic, if he find the meaning of Camoens in some instances altered, imagine that he has found a blunder in the Translator. … It was not to gratify the dull few, whose greatest pleasure in reading a translation is to see what the author exactly says; it was to give a poem that might live in the English language which was the ambition of the Translator. … And the original is in the hands of the world.”

“You know, they say in France that translation is like a woman: she is either beautiful or faithful.”

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.”