Quotes from Eliot Weinberger

Poetry is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.

Great poetry lives in a state of perpetual transformation, perpetual translation: the poem dies when it has no place to go.

Hear the wind and you will know the wind. Wind blows, and the generations are its leaves. There was no higher praise than what was said of Confucius: He knows where the wind comes from.

Japan: A stranger hands you a stone and asks you to hold it. Puzzled, you take it. The stone grows. And grows until you are crushed

What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.

Young girls would paint themselves like parakeets. Bothersome children are like parakeets. If you dream a parakeet is lying in an oven you may be certain that soon you will die. The shells of hatched parakeets turn into maggots, which turn into lizards, which creep down the throats of sleeping people

A new line is a new mind.

Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones - both of which are untranslatable. But translators tend to rush in where wise men never, tread, and often may be seen attempting to nurture Chinese rhyme patterns in the hostile environment of Western language.