Robert Fitzgerald Quotes
Robert Fitzgerald Quotes
- 1
After leaving college and while working on a newspaper and then on a magazine in New York, I wanted not to lose what Greek I had acquired.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 2
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.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 3
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 4
I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 5
I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 6
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 7
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 8
In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 9
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 10
Of course anything can happen, and as we know there are a great many examples of the other way of doing it, but I myself don't think I would enjoy it.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert 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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 12
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 13
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 14
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 15
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 16
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.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 17
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 18
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-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 19
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 20
Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.
Robert-FitzgeraldRobert Fitzgerald
- 21
Yes, well there again, the work of the imagination originally came out of a particular air that blew over a particular body of water.
Robert-Fitzgerald/">Robert Fitzgerald
