Marjorie Agosín Quotes

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

Writing and culture are very much related to the possibilities of the human imagination. The capacity of language allows the imagination to flow and to transform and mend the world.

To write is also to bear witness, to resist the dehumanization of the world, and to tell and reveal.

Since the earliest history, poetry and the spoken word have been the pulse of human civilization.

To write in Spanish is for me a gesture of survival, and because of translation my memory has now become a part of the memory of others. Translators are not traitors, as the proverb says, traductores, traidores--but rather splendid friends in this great human community of language.

how to become someone else-that's perhaps the greatest challenge for a translator because to become someone else is to become compassionate. To become someone else, you have to be in love with someone else. And in that sense I strongly believe that translations are acts of love

I think that memory is a form of translation. What motivates the artistic expression of poets and fiction writers, essayists and painters is memory. But memory is also very complicated because it consists of what one chooses to remember.

The translation of art, the translation of poetry, however, is the translation of the spirit. A good translator translates what is not said.

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

Translations are like crossings of borders, crossings of landscapes, crossings of voices.

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

If America is a grandiose melting pot and multicultural society, then it is also a place that has not fully welcomed its immigrants, especially those of color. It is a place that used to prohibit the speaking of native tongues, and it is a place that racially profiles those whose origin is from elsewhere. A friend recently asked me why I seem so critical of this society that has given me so much. I think that to be critical is to be American. Freedom, complete freedom, includes the right to a dissenting opinion, the right to question an election. However, considering that only 30% of the citizens of the United States vote, it is fair to call the political culture dormant.

Home is understanding and being understood.

We are what we remember and we understand heritage and belonging through our own passion to remember. Home is a living scrap-book of memory that we carry as we move about, as we remember the vanquished and their respective passions and sorrows. Memory can never reside in abstraction. Memory must be cemented into concrete, must be worn like a dress, must be lived in like a home of differing levels, textures, and colors.

Only while in nature's perfection—where there is no difference between the outside world and myself and, at the same time, my own indifference—have I truly felt that I belonged.