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.
From Robert Fitzgerald
What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.
I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.
I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.
I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.
In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.
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.
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.
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 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.
3 perspectives
1 perspectives