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" 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
Looking
Way
Say
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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. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Language
Handsome
Words
" Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Language
Us
Voices
" Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Elegance
Poetry
Most
" 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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Language
Strange
Work
" In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Will
Vocabulary
English
" 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
Myself
Language
Literature
" 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
Tongue
Tradition
Language
" 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 whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Light
Wind
Changes
" I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Think
Grateful
Everyone
" 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
Think
Winter
Work
" What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Does
Doing
Myself
" 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
Well
Matter
Language
" I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Think
Which
Ways
" 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
Kind
Meant To Be
Tradition
" 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
Your
Relationship
Just
" 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
Question
Encouragement
Need
" 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. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Work
Principles
Art
" 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
Heart
You
Me
" I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition. "
Robert Fitzgerald
Working
Go
Know
" 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
Way
Language
Quality
" 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
Enough
Think
Slow