“The life-stream of literature flows in the veins of language; if it is impeded then the heart-beat of the original composition is stopped. The subject-matter of literature becomes inert, if there is no life in it. I feel this all the time when I turn up my old translations. You perhaps know that when a calf dies and its mother doesn’t want to give milk because of its loss, then an artificial simulacrum of a calf is made by skinning it and filling the skin with straw. The similarity of its smell and appearance to the real thing makes the udders of the cow ooze milk again. Translation is like that stuffed cow: it has no genuine appeal – it’s a deception. I feel shame and regret when I think of it. If the work I have done in literature is not ephemeral or provincial, then whatever merit it has will have to be discovered in my own language. There is no other way to discover it. If anyone is deprived by the time this will take, then that’s his loss – it’s no fault of the author’s.”

(Rabindranath Tagore, letter to Amiya Chakravarty, 6 January 1935. Quoted – and translated – in William Radice’s introduction to Tagore’s Gitanjali (Penguin 2011), p. liii.)

“ ‘Now,’ she said to herself, ‘when people believed in God they carried Him from one place to another. They carried Him through the jungles and across the Arctic Circle. God watched over everybody, and all men where brothers. Now there is nothing to carry with you from one place to another, and as far as I’m concerned, these people might as well be kangaroos; yet somehow there must be someone here who will remind me of something . . . I must try to find a nest in this outlandish place.’ ”

(Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies, p. 41.)

“In terms of shaping a silent life this image raises some interesting questions – is the silence in the hearing or the speaking? If I keep a journal, say, with no intention of ‘transmitting’ its content to anyone ever, is that a more silent activity than writing this book in the hope that you will read it and head what I have to say? Is writing, or even reading, which use language but not noise, ‘silent’ in any case?”

(Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence, p. 27.)

“An agricultural people, efficiently tilling fertile soil – and one is reminded of the pre-Columbian Mayans – can live fairly comfortably on an aggregate of forty or fifty days labour a year. Inevitably, however, some organizing genius comes along to make sure that the spare three hundred days are occupied in impressive but largely wasteful undertakings.”

(Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, p. 226.)

“A circumstance worthy of remark is that the name of Rome is familiar to nearly all the Cambodians; they pronounce it Rouma, and place it at the western end of the world.”

(Henri Mouhot, Travels in the Central Parts of Indo-China: Siam, Cambodia and Laos during the Years 1858, 1859 and 1860, chapter XIV.)

“Nogent-Saint-Laurent, who is a member of the Committee on Literary Copyright, said that he favored perpetuity of rights. Sainte-Beuve protested violently: ‘You are paid by the smoke and noise you stir up. You ought to say, every writer ought to say: “Take it all: you’re welcome to it!” ’ Flaubert, going to the opposite extreme, exclaimed: ‘If I had invented the railways I shouldn’t want anybody to travel on them without my permission!’ Thoroughly roused, Sainte-Beuve retorted: ‘No more literary property than any other property! There should be no property at all. Everything should be regularly renewed, so that everybody can take his turn.’

In these few words, sprung from the most secret and sincere depths of his soul, I saw the fanatical revolutionary bachelor in Sainte-Beuve, and he seemed at that moment to have the character and almost the appearance of one of the levellers of the Convention. I saw the basic destructive urge in that man who, rubbing shoulders with society, money, and power, had conceived a secret hatred for them, a bitter jealousy which extended to everything, to youth, to the conquest of women, to the good looks of his neighbour at dinner, Nieuwerkerke, who had slept with real society women without having to pay.”

(Edmond & Jules de Goncourt, 14 February 1863, Pages from the Goncourt Journal, trans. Robert Baldick, p. 80.)

INTERVIEWER

How does your interest in flying technology fit into your view of technology in general, which is fairly suspicious? You’ve written several times, and eloquently, about cars, for instance, about how they’ve changed our views of space, of the city, of our own bodies.

DAVENPORT

The point of view I take is the point of view of Diogenes, which is that when a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man. The thing about technology is that it owns us. I know several desperately poor people, practically beggars, who own cars. On the other hand, you have people who drive their cars to work, to make a living, or to have a delightful excursion in it with the wife and children. But the point is that all progress asks that we pay a kind of ransom or blackmail in order to have it.

(Guy Davenport interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The Paris Review, fall 2002.)

“So that the reader of these pages may be under no misapprehension I hasten to tell him that he will find in them little information. This book is the record of a journey through Burmah, the Shan States, Siam and Indo-China. I am writing it for my own diversion and I hope that it will divert also such as care to spend a few hours in reading it. I am a professional writer and I hope to get from it a certain amount of money and perhaps a little praise.”

(Somerset Maugham, The Gentleman in the Parlour, chapter IV, p. 8.)

“. . . remember that there is no language more difficult to write than English. In the long history of our literature it would be difficult to find more than six persons who have written it faultlessly.”

(Somerset Maugham, preface to The Gentleman in the Parlour, p. ix.)

“It is not that people today are wicked or stupid; they are simply deaf. The thundering of the machine they have set in motion and which carries them toward the precipice is so loud that the far-off cries of those who have been excluded by the machine because they hold no ticket never reach the deafened ears of that joyous assemblage.”

(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The End of a Post-War Era,” originally in La libertà d’Italia, 6 October 1950; p. 140 in Stories from the City of God: Sketches and Chronicles of Rome, 1950–1966, trans. Marina Harss.)