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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.

Robert Fitzgerald

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Robert Fitzgerald
Age: 74 †
Born: 1910
Born: October 12
Died: 1985
Died: January 16
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Geneva
New York
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald
Matter
Understood
Spoke
Great
Either
Slightly
Different
Read
Quantity
Times
Latin
Language
Greek
Certain
French
Imperfectly
Wells
Suppose
Quantities
Well
However
Spokes

More quotes by Robert Fitzgerald

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Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
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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.
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I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
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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.
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Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
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Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
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Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.
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What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
Robert Fitzgerald