Words&Dirt

“While translation is always pursued at real risk to both rhyme and reason, surely what can be found in translation is also an additional measure of meaning and elegance.  Try as we might, we cannot avoid to some degree ‘making up’ our interpretation and ‘making over’ the text with it.  But at the same time, one way or another, there is always the possibility of enlarging the meaning of the text in making it our own.  To thus ‘appreciate’ the text means not only to become aware of its scale and sophistication, but also to become creatively responsive to it, and in the process of becoming intimate with it, to add our own unique value that expands the text further.”

––Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary, by Roger T. Ames, pg. 39

“‘Why does she look like that?’ asked Ender.  ‘What’s happened to her?’

‘Her parents died when she was little.  But in recent years she has come to love another man like a father.  The man who was just killed by the piggies.  It’s his death she wants you to speak.’

Looking at her face, Ender set aside his concern for the hive queen, for the pequeninos.  He recognized that expression of adult agony in a child’s face.  He had seen it before, in the final weeks of the Bugger War, as he was pushed beyond the limits of his endurance, playing battle after battle in a game that was not a game.  He had seen it when the war was over, when he found out that his training sessions were not training at all, that all his simulations were the real thing, as he commanded the human fleets by ansible.  Then, when he knew that he had killed all the buggers in existence, when he understood the act of xenocide that he had unwittingly committed, that was the look of his own face in the mirror, bearing guilt too heavy to be borne.”

––Speaker for the Dead, by Orson Scott Card, pg. 64