Quote

It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.

Alberto Manguel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alberto Manguel
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: March 13
Editor
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Alberto Manguel
First
Reader
Guise
Wealth
Translation
Since
Translations
Reading
Text
Lost
Faced
Another
Paradox
Attendant
Also
Innocence
Inescapable
Firsts
Mystery
Restored

More quotes by Alberto Manguel

Image
If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
Alberto Manguel
Image
This morning I looked at the books on my shelves and thought that they have no knowledge of my existence. They come to life because I open them and turn their pages, and yet they don't know that I am their reader.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Not until I came to Canada did I realize that snow was a four-letter word.
Alberto Manguel
Image
In every literate society, learning to read is something of an initiation, a ritualized passage out of a state of dependency and rudimentary communication.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
Alberto Manguel
Image
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
Alberto Manguel
Image
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Alberto Manguel
Image
The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading We are what we read.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I've never really understood attachment to a place for reasons of birth. That my mother happened to give birth to me in a certain place doesn't, to my mind, justify any thankfulness towards that place. It could have been anywhere.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. ‘They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.
Alberto Manguel
Image
But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.
Alberto Manguel
Image
We seem to live a culture that doesn't want blemishes. The vision of most beautiful models... airbrushed in order to be seen as perfect, infects our notion of how literature should be written.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I never talked to anyone about my reading the need to share came afterwords.
Alberto Manguel
Image
To say that an author is a reader or a reader an author, to see a book as a human being or a human being a book, to describe the world as text or a text as the world, are ways of naming the readers craft.
Alberto Manguel
Image
I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.
Alberto Manguel
Image
Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination.
Alberto Manguel