American - Author | October 12, 1910 - January 16, 1985
Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
Robert Fitzgerald
QualityLanguageWishesSeriousWay
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.
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That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.
MyselfMeLanguageLiteratureWay
The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
HeartMeYou Can Do ItLanguageYou
The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.
WorkImaginationLanguageNothing
There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
RelationshipKnowOwnMustJust
Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.
I AmThinkSlowEnoughGiftedMay
Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.
GreatLanguageMatterWellDifferent
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
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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.
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Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
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