All Robert Fitzgerald Quotes
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
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I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
Robert Fitzgerald
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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
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Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.
Robert Fitzgerald
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
Robert Fitzgerald
54% of people like this quote
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 Fitzgerald
53% of people like this quote
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
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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
52% of people like this quote
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