ed

“Not gonna lie, Your Highness. Every time I see you now, I feel anxious and my body tenses, like whoever walks next to you will have something happen to them. So when I see you walking with Ling Wen, my heartbeat quickened. Ling Wen, you best be careful for the next little while.”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]

“But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialitic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Doesn’t this say they all died by suicide?” Xie Lian said.

“Before I would make my move, I’d send messengers to greet them first, and they’d end themselves,” Hua Cheng replied. “So, perhaps that doesn’t count as my kill?”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 天官赐福 [Tiān Guān Cì Fú]

“So, you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as the rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the authors ideology and biases.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel