Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

24 quotes in 387 categories

• 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…
• Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story
• 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…
• I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
• 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…
• I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.
• In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go…
• 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…
• In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
• 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…
• 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…
• There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.
• 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…
• What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
• 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…
• Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

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