Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s “lucky” isn’t the bland gratitude of a comfortable scholar; it’s a translator’s sly admission that atmosphere can be a tool as real as a dictionary. He frames his work on the Odyssey not as an academic exercise but as a lived weather system: the sea is “Homer’s,” the houses are perched close enough to feel the punch of winter storms, and the body becomes a tuning fork for the poem’s conditions. Calling it luck signals a kind of humility, but also a quiet flex: he earned proximity to the original’s elemental pressure.

The subtext is a defense of translation as immersion rather than extraction. Fitzgerald suggests that you can’t render the Odyssey’s salt-and-stone violence from a safe inland desk. The line about a house “shaken” by impact is doing more than scene-setting; it’s a metaphor for the way the epic should hit a translator. The Odyssey is a poem of endurance, disorientation, and return, and Fitzgerald implies that the translator’s job is to be rattled into the right tempo - to feel what the poem feels like.

Context matters: mid-20th-century English translations of the classics were often split between museum-glass literalism and breezy modernization. Fitzgerald positions his approach as something tougher and more sensory, a kind of creative fidelity. He isn’t claiming to be Homer; he’s claiming to have listened from the shoreline, where the language can’t stay calm because the sea won’t.