Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s genial, almost offhand phrasing is doing a lot of intellectual stage-managing. “I would then go on to say” sounds like a lecturer easing you into a footnote, but the real move is authority: he positions himself as the mediator between a mythic name (“Homer”) and the modern apparatus that explains him. The little parenthetical, “as we now know,” is the clincher. It flags scholarship as a living, revisable thing while quietly asserting that earlier, more romantic visions of Homer - solitary genius, pen in hand, inventing the West - are obsolete.

Then comes the sly deflation: “what they call an oral tradition.” Fitzgerald is close enough to the academy to borrow its term, but distant enough to keep his own voice clean of jargon. “They” both credits and gently quarantines the specialists. It’s not anti-intellectual; it’s translator’s pragmatism. Fitzgerald, famed for rendering the Odyssey into supple English, is reminding us that Homer’s original medium wasn’t “literature” as we tend to mean it, but performance: formula, repetition, memory, audience response, a poem built to travel by voice.

The subtext is also a quiet defense of translation itself. If the epics were born from communal technique rather than private inscription, then fidelity isn’t just about matching words on a page. It’s about recreating momentum, clarity, and music for listeners who have become readers. Fitzgerald’s sentence modernizes Homer without shrinking him: the grandeur remains, but the method gets demystified, and that demystification becomes its own kind of respect.