“A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.”

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.

The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.

Either move or be moved.

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever.

Be not cheap or mediocre in desiring.

The difference between a gun and a tree is a difference of tempo. The tree explodes every spring.

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

The only history that matters is the history we know.

It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself.

Poetry is a very complex art, It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.

The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy.

It doesn’t matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

I believe every translation is a process in which something is lost in the original precisely so that something is gained in the new text.

For me, every translation is a new book, with the translator inevitably broadening the meaning of the original book in any translation.

I was confident that I could find an editor and the readership for a translation

I am not one of those translators who think that working closely with the writer will yield the best translation.

What I am trying to translate to you is more mysterious, it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the implacable source of sensations.

Please, never despise the translator. He’s the mailman of human civilization.