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Every book should be an incentive to studying the language. Every book should provide at least some contact with the original, for example, a parallel text and a glossary. At present we are struggling to take the translation business away from the caste leader, for whom the mass reader is a fiction, an "easy mark" ignorant of foreign languages.

— Osip Mandelstam ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)

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More quotes by Osip Mandelstam

Only in Russia poetry is respected – it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

Why can't we shake things up, why can't these good translators be utilized in collective undertakings?

ON TRANSLATIONS translated into English in The complete critical prose (1997)

We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us,
Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard.

One question conditions the dynamics and balance of color in the composition of a painting: whence the source of light?

The essence of nineteenth century cognitive activity is projection.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Osip Mandelstam (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.