Robert Fitzgerald American Author Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, well there again, the work of the imagination originally came out of a particular air that blew over a particular body of water.

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.

When I went to work I had nothing but my own Greek in my own hand before me to try to match with English in the blank lines underneath the Greek.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

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.