Get 10 minutes from your busy life? Want to travel but have no time or money or have no grandparents to watch your kids? Want to give yourself a well-deserved social media detox? Want to show your kids (not just tell them) that books are more fun than smart phones/ipad/TV? Consider reading a book by a foreign writer then. I bet you won’t regret.

Happy International Translation Day! (Yes, it’s celebrated annually on Sept. 30 on the feast of St. Jerome, who translated the Bible.)

For me, I’m going to read Orhan Pamuk’s “Istanbul.” I’ve read his “Snow” and liked it. Turkey is a country I’m very curious about and would really love to visit.

Here are some of my favorite quotes about translation.

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” – Walter Benjamin

“Translation is the art of failure.” – Umberto Eco

“It’s better to have read a great work of another culture in translation than never to have read it at all.” – Henry Gratton Doyle

“I just enjoy translating. It’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.” – Iris Murdoch

“Translate Chinese into English is like put clouds into a box.” – a translator in the UK

“Overly literal translation, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.” – Ken Liu. ( Ken Liu, a writer and a translator, has translated Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” and many other Chinese works. He’s played a key role in introducing Chinese science fiction to the West.)

My favorite quote is from Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory.” In the book, he says, “For the present, final, edition of Speak, Memory, I have not only introduced basic changes and copious additions into the initial English text, but have availed myself of the corrections I made while turning it into Russian. This re-English of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.”

Here is my own words about translation based on my experience: “Language is not merely a tool, but a mindset. To translate, in a way, is to rewrite.”

Have you picked your book yet?