Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgeraldwas an American poet, critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students." He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. In addition, he also composed several books of his own poetry...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 October 1910
CountryUnited States of America
advantage american-author great language living might otherwise
All this was really a great advantage in making the language come nearer, at least to being a living one for me, than it might otherwise have been.
pope notes should
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.
winter thinking rocks
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.
thinking two way
I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
character ears pages
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.
grateful thinking
I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.
over-you way poet
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?
art different way
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.
latin vocabulary use
In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
encouragement facts needs
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.
song guitar bob
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.
quality wish way
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.
voice language
Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
taken imagination strange
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.