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The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

Marilyn Hacker

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Marilyn Hacker
Age: 81
Born: 1942
Born: November 27
Editor
Journalist
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
Lost
Gained
Important
Vocabulary
Transition
Ambiguities
Fascinating
Linguistics
Terms
Linguistic
Literature
Syntax
Term
Connotation
Language
Ambiguity

More quotes by Marilyn Hacker

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As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.
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There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.
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You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.
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Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.
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Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.
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With, or despite our scars, we stay alive.
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The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.
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I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
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The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.
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Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.
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The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.
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I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.
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Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.
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I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.
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I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.
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Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.
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We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.
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Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.
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Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.
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Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.
Marilyn Hacker