Marilyn Hacker

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

— Marilyn Hacker

You happened to me. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse.

— Marilyn Hacker

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy…

— Marilyn Hacker

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in…

— Marilyn Hacker

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

— Marilyn Hacker

I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn…

— Marilyn Hacker

“Lovely and unremarkable, the clutter of mugs and books, the almost-empty Fig Newtons box, thick dishes in a big tin tray, the…

— Marilyn Hacker

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already…

— Marilyn Hacker

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

— Marilyn Hacker

“From Orient Point The art of living isn't hard to muster: Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend. When someone makes…

— Marilyn Hacker

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem…

— Marilyn Hacker

“imagine that it were given back to me to be the child who knew departure would be sweet, the boy who drew…

— Marilyn Hacker

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you…

— Marilyn Hacker

“Nearly a Valediction" You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van…

— Marilyn Hacker

“Sweetheart, it isn’t lust; it’s all the rest of what I want with you that scares me shitless.”

— Marilyn Hacker

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I…

— Marilyn Hacker

Women love a sick child or a healthy animal; A man who is both itches them like an incubus.

— Marilyn Hacker

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach…

— Marilyn Hacker

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

— Marilyn Hacker

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences,…

— Marilyn Hacker

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a…

— Marilyn Hacker

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

— Marilyn Hacker

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment.…

— Marilyn Hacker

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different…

— Marilyn Hacker

There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something.

— Marilyn Hacker