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Monday, February 9, 2009

Quote from " A History of Reading"

"As we read a text in our own languge, the text itself becomes a barrier. We can go into it as far as its words allow, embracing all their possible definitions; we can bring other texts to bear upon it and to reflect it, as in a hall of mirrors; we can construct another, critical text that will extend and illuminate the one we are reading; but we cannot escape the fact that its language is the limit of our universe.
Translation proposes a sort of parallel universe, another space and time in which the text reveals other, extraordinary possible meanings.
For these meanings, however, there are no words, since they exist in the intuitive no man's land between the language of the original and the language of the translator."
Alberto Manguel A History of Reading Pg. 276

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