A Goldberg Variation
Final page of The New York Times Book Review, issue dated January 7, 2007:
On using speech-recognition software to dictate a book:
"Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page. 'From your lips to God's ears,' goes the old Yiddish wish. The writer, by contrast, tries to read God's lips and pass along the words…. And for that, an interface will never be clean or invisible enough for us to get the passage right….
Everthing we write– through any medium– is lost in translation. But something new is always found again, in their eager years. In Derrida's fears. Make that: in the reader's ears."
— Richard Powers (author of The Gold Bug Variations)
Found in translation:
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for details.