Sedulia's Quotations

Arthur Waley translates from an unknown tongue

Mr Waley is unconquerable. I remember, for instance, the day when he was expected for the week-end at my brother Sacheverell's house in the country, and my sister-in-law and I, finding in the library a small and ancient book in an unknown tongue, placed it beside Mr Waley's bed in the hope that he would confess himself defeated. Next morning, Mr Waley looked a little pale; his manner was languid, but as he placed the book on the breakfast table he announced in a faint voice: 'Turkish. 18th century.' The pages were few; and after an interval of respect we enquired: 'What is it about?' Mr Waley, with sudden animation: 'The Cat and the Bat. The Cat sat on the Mat. The Cat ate the Rat.' 'Oh, it is a child's book.' 'One would imagine so. One would hope so!'

—Edith Sitwell (1187–1864), in Some English Eccentrics. Arthur Waley (1889–1966) was a famous translator from Japanese and Chinese.

 

 

 

Martin Amis: a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander

It was...a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union.

–Martin Amis (1949-) in Koba the Dread, a political biography of Stalin

Churchill on writing a book

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. 

       --Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

Stephen Spender tells T.S. Eliot he wants to be a poet

In 1930 T.S. Eliot had decided to publish four of his [Stephen Spender's] poems in the Criterion, and furthermore invited him to lunch.

"At our first luncheon he [T.S. Eliot] asked me what I wanted to do. I said: 'Be a poet.' 'I can understand you wanting to write poems, but I don't quite know what you mean by "being a poet,"' he objected."

  --Stephen Spender, quoted in essay "Stephen Spender: A Nice Bloody Fool," by Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) in posthumous anthology Arguably

Peter France: The translator is a raider, bringing home booty

...Peter France... spoke of how a translation can become a source of insight, but also pointed out that translation from a minority into a majority language can be seen as a political act: one of aggression, of colonisation, in which 'the translator is a raider, bringing home booty which is then made available like tea or sugar to consumers in the dominant cultures'.

--From the Introduction to An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic verse, ed. Ronald Black (pub. 1999), p. lxv

Illustration from The Book of Discoverers and Explorers (pub. 1900), by Edward R. Shaw

Thomas Carlyle calls the French excitable

The French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the perilous evil, which belongs to that. Rebellion, explosion, of unknown extent is to be calculated on.

  --Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) in The French Revolution: A History (1837), ch. 1.2.VIII

Jerome K Jerome on the difference between German and British children (1900)

In the German parks there are special seats labelled, 'Only for grown-ups' ('Nur für Erwachsene'), and the German small boy, anxious to sit down and reading that notice, passes by, and hunts for a seat on which children are permitted to rest; and there he seats himself, careful not to touch the woodwork with his muddy boots. Imagine a seat in Regent's or Saint James's Park labelled 'Only for grown-ups'! Every child for five miles round would be trying to get on that seat, and hauling other children off who were on. As for any 'grown-up', he would never be able to get within half a mile of that seat for the crowd. The German small boy, who has accidentally sat down on such without noticing, rises with a start when his error is pointed out to him, and goes away with downcast head, blushing to the roots of his hair with shame and regret.

  --Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) in Three Men on the Bummel (published 1900)

Virginia Woolf: Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light…it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature… literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.

  --Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) in her essay On Being Ill (1926)

Charles Darwin does not recognize the word "mother"

...our chief intellectual exercise was the Letter Game: word-making and word-taking.  At this we became practically professional....Any dictionary word was allowed, but no proper names, and a word could be stolen only by adding a letter and changing the meaning... This had been a Down game originally...[Down was Charles Darwin's house].

Then there was the story of my grandfather (C.D.) [Charles Darwin] who, on seeing the word MOTHER on the board, looked at it for a long time, and then said, "Moe-ther; there's no word MOETHER." I feel that the Psychologists might get a great deal of fun out of this anecdote--I beg their pardons, I don't mean fun, but Important Information; clues to the conception of the Origin of Species on the one hand, or to his ill health on the other; both of which developments could doubtless be proved by this story to be the direct consequences of the early death of his own MOETHER.

  --Gwendolen Darwin Raverat (1885-1957), Charles Darwin's granddaughter, in her memoir Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (1952), chapter XII, Sport. The whole Darwin family sounds wonderful

P.D. James: Detective novels give realistic picture of their age

[Detective fiction] often gives a much more realistic picture of its age than more prestigious books. If you really want to know what it's like to be a policeman in Scotland, you read Rankin. And if you want to know what it was like to work in a City office between the wars, you read Dorothy Sayers's Murder Must Advertise.

  --Interview with writer P.D. James in Tatler, July 2012