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“Kundera goes on and uses Kafka’s The Castle as an example how translators smudges the original ideas. Kafka’s vocabulary is relatively restricted and Kafka is using simplest, the most elementary verbs: go, have, be, do, must, can. Translators, however, “correct” Kafka and enrich his vocabulary by replacing “have” for “never ceased to experience”, “be” for “advance”, “thrust”, or “go a long way”, and “go” for “walk”.”
P. Bilak, notes on translation in Kundera's work (1999)

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Like a grandiose despot, the East in its power and splendor casts its inhabitants to the ground and, before man has learned to walk, he is forced to kneel, before he has learned to speak, he is forced to pray; before his heart has attained an equipoise it is forced to bow, before his spirit is strong enough to bear flowers and fruit, Fate and Nature drains all his strength through horrid heat. The Egyptian is devoted before he is a whole, hence he knows nothing of the whole, nothing of Beauty, and what he calls the highest is a veiled power, an awesome enigma; the dumb, dark Isis is his first and last, an empty infinity, and out of that nothing reasonable has ever come. Even the most sublime nothingness gives birth to nothingness...
Hölderlin, Hyperion.

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