mistranslations result in beauty

19

Blind children studying the hippopatamus

23 SEP 2026

Marcel Proust
as quoted by Gilles Deleuze
in Dialogues II

“Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty.”