The Translator Quotes

“She knew - she knew by now - that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must; and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.”
― John Crowley, The Translator: A Historical Romance Between an Exiled Russian Poet and His American Translator During the Cuban Missile Crisis

“But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?”
― John Crowley, The Translator: A Historical Romance Between an Exiled Russian Poet and His American Translator During the Cuban Missile Crisis

“She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.”
― John Crowley, The Translator: A Historical Romance Between an Exiled Russian Poet and His American Translator During the Cuban Missile Crisis

“But Max said: “Last summer I spent working these peace booths at state fairs. We’d go around in this bigole pickup with this knocked-down booth in the back and boxes of literature. People’d come up to me and hear me talking about colonialism or the bomb or who was responsible for the Cold War, and they’d start railing on Communists. Communists, these damn Communists. And I’d say hey, hold on now, you’re talkin’ about my mother. They’d look at me like I’d turned into a Russky before their very eyes. It certainly shut ’em up.” He smiled to remember, delighted. “They were good people. Country people. Didn’t want to say anything bad about a fellow’s mom.” Saul”
― John Crowley, The Translator: A Historical Romance Between an Exiled Russian Poet and His American Translator During the Cuban Missile Crisis