"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"
About this Quote
The subtext is about authority. Print culture trains us to treat words as fixed objects, stabilizing interpretation through what can be pointed to, quoted, and footnoted. Fitzgerald reminds us that Homeric language was once mobile, social, and improvisational - owned by the mouth and the ear, not by a definitive manuscript. That changes the stakes of "authenticity": tradition becomes less a chain of exact replicas and more a living system, where variation is not corruption but the method.
Context matters because Fitzgerald, as a major translator of Homer, is also defending the translator’s task. If the original work was fundamentally oral, then a translation can’t just be a museum-grade transcription; it has to recover the pressures of sound, pace, and breath. He’s arguing, subtly, that fidelity is rhythmic and communal, not merely lexical - and that our literate certainty may be the least Homeric thing about how we read Homer.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Fitzgerald, Robert. (2026, January 16). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/homers-whole-language-the-language-in-which-he-134567/
Chicago Style
Fitzgerald, Robert. "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." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/homers-whole-language-the-language-in-which-he-134567/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/homers-whole-language-the-language-in-which-he-134567/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
