Robert Fitzgerald quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Robert Fitzgerald

Top Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

Browse top 18 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Robert Fitzgerald.

Favorite Robert Fitzgerald Quotes

1. "In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

2. "Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

3. "There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

4. "What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

5. "Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

6. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

7. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

8. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

9. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

10. "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 for him? Would this do or not?" ~ Robert Fitzgerald

11. "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

12. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

13. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

14. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

15. "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

16. "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." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

17. "I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

18. "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 the songs of Homer." ~ Robert Fitzgerald

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Today's Quote

To that point I had not realized that in doing something I love, and at which at times I may even excel, I felt something I could only define as akin to an electric volt deep in my core. From where did this power come? Was it the presence--extension or workings or shadow--of something else in me? Or was it something else encouraging me to love through what I love?"
Author: Carolyn Weber