( via / via )

"There’s very little money in actually selling product."

"And the citizens, denied every word, invented an animal: the grass mud horse, a noble mythical alpaca whose name in Mandarin is a perfect homophone for 'fuck your mother,' which spawned songs, plush toys, nature documentaries about its battle with the river crab (homophone: 'harmony,' the official euphemism for censorship). The people built a fake zoology with one entry just to say the sentence on the parchment. The state banned the alpaca." —@terminallydrifting via

"The civilisation that could have given rise to an American Homer was wiped out when the settlers arrived."

"Sisson is very good on how the making of a translation is the most attentive kind of reading one can do; but that most fully successful importations of a style or tone or form from one language to another are found not in translations themselves, but in imitations of various kinds, even if their success is rooted in the practice of translation."