Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Hacker’s line reads like a shrug that’s doing covert work. “I don’t think it’s by accident” is a refusal of the tidy origin story: it pushes back against the idea that a translator simply “discovers” a writer the way you stumble onto a good book in a used shop. She’s naming attraction as patterned, political, and personal all at once. Translation here isn’t neutral craft; it’s a choice shaped by appetite, allegiance, and biography.

The specificity matters: “two French women poets.” French literature carries institutional heft, but “women poets” signals the countercurrent inside that canon. Hacker implies that her earliest translation impulse was already oriented toward voices historically under-cited, under-taught, and under-translated into English. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the default pipeline of literary prestige: men get assumed; women get “found.” She positions translation as a corrective technology, a way to re-route attention and authority across languages.

There’s also an intimacy in “attracted.” Not “interested” or “influenced” but pulled, magnetized. That word suggests identification as much as admiration, and for a poet like Hacker, whose work engages gender, sexuality, and cosmopolitan lineage, attraction hints at kinship: translation as a relationship rather than a service. The “first” is the tell. She’s tracing a throughline back to the beginning, arguing that her later commitments weren’t adopted trends; they were present at the origin. The sentence is modest in posture, but it stakes a claim: literary history isn’t accidental, and neither is who gets carried across borders.