Marjorie Agosín Quotes

...love letters that aren't read fade away. ("Cartographies")

Books unite people and books in translation are the thresholds of other cultures, invitations to travel and to know others.

I don’t agree that all is lost in translation, but I think a great deal is lost, especially in poetry, where every word seems to hold a universe. Especially, considering the inner-workings of language, in a poem. The musicality, the rhythm, the juxtaposition of words, all of that is very hard to convey. Maybe a short story—or a chapter in a novel—would be easier. On the other hand, we need translators and I think they’re remarkably important. I think they should occupy a prominent place in the history of literature.

And we prepared quickly for sleep. The mist crackled in the deep heart of the travelling night. We, too, were of a cross-roads, wounded by the pleasure of watching. We were in Austria and I thought of the wounds of my grandfather and of the music of Mozart, like a stream, like a litany, like a fragrance. Then I learned perhaps to be happy in those hospitable, desolate meadows, because the war had erased every trace of scars and only in certain looks were hollow aches and the calamity of dead children still preserved. (beginning of "The Eiderdown")

you can be a Jew so rooted in your history and in your values that in a way God becomes secondary. And I think that's an amazing thing that Jews have been able to say. But what has linked my Judaism to my experience as a writer are two fundamental things. I think that Judaism has always understood the world from an ethical point of view, and I'm not talking about contemporary Israel or politics, but I'm talking about the Ten Commandments and the necessity, this old Talmudic concept where the title of the book comes from, "to mend to world": to create justice, if you save one life you save the world, is basically saying if you are a decent human being, you are really doing decent things in the world. So the ethics of Judaism and the struggles for social justice have been what I have wanted to take from that Judaism.

Women and women artists are looking at a place to belong in the world and to call home in a very particular way. I think that women are looking for a place that will allow them to be visible. I think we live in very conflicted gender times, and most of it is the possibility for visibility: visibility as creators, visibility in the home. If you look at the whole scope of the human rights situation, you see how women are always hidden, even the veil is a form of hiding. So I think that home is to become visible.

Home is understanding and being understood.

translators are the messengers of the spirit. You bring a message to someone who does not understand the original.

Sometimes I imagine the Torah as the great book of the world handed from person to person and generation to generation so that we may remember what unites us and to help us imagine that in all lands there is the possibility of creating a history and participating in it. Books have the strength to create a mutual complicity between writer and reader and they allow the great human family to celebrate through words the memories of other times and places.

I think I am a bit like Mistral: always a foreigner, always from somewhere else. (2015)

As a child I would always be asked whether I was Jewish or Chilean and, thus, my identity became always conflicted, always a matter of either/or and seldom both. ("Jewish Women in Latin America")

I've always struggled to retain what I have lost, and I've tried to retain it through writing, but then I realize that not even writing can hold to this tremendous loss, and that's why it's so fragmented.

To be Jewish in Chile was to be above all a foreigner

That night the voice on the radio calls what is happening to Chile "the restoration of order to the country." I write the words down in my notebook and wonder what was out of order before? (p91)

as poets, as writers, as artists we can copy others, but it is very dangerous to copy one's self.