Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Translation, for Fitzgerald, is less a ferry ride than a border crossing where the laws change mid-step. He’s not talking about swapping words like coins; he’s pointing at something more stubborn: a language is an entire system that “grew up” under particular pressures - its music, its assumptions about clarity and ambiguity, its preferred rhythms, its habitual metaphors. Once a poem or epic has “formed itself on those principles,” it carries that upbringing in its bones. You don’t just move meaning; you move an aesthetic logic.

The sly force of the passage is in the phrase “work of art.” Fitzgerald frames translation as an artistic act with its own ethical stakes, not a clerical task. The “problem” isn’t accuracy versus freedom in the tired way we argue it; it’s how to reconstitute a living artifact inside a different medium whose audience “hears” differently. “Heard and understood” smuggles in performance and culture: sound, cadence, the social feel of diction, what registers as elevated or plain. A line that lands like thunder in Greek may arrive in English as mere noise unless rebuilt according to English’s own acoustics and expectations.

Context matters: Fitzgerald is best known for translating Homer, where the source text is both literature and inherited oral song. His point is quietly radical: fidelity isn’t obedience to the original’s surface, but a hard-won equivalence of effect - the kind that admits loss, demands invention, and refuses the fantasy that languages share the same rules of beauty.