Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer’s sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.

Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don’t know.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer.

What the translator – myself in particular – does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.

I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.