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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
What the translator – myself in particular – does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing. Robert Fitzgerald Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
