Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

A poet doesn’t call language “ambiguous” as a complaint. Hacker frames ambiguity as a working condition, even a kind of generative weather: vocabulary and syntax don’t just carry meaning, they smuggle it. “Connotation” is the quiet engine here. Denotation is what a word points to; connotation is what it drags behind it - class, gender, nation, education, desire, shame. For a poet, that drag is not noise but music, the difference between a line that reports and a line that haunts.

The pairing of “lost” and “gained” is the tell. Hacker isn’t nostalgic about an original purity of speech; she’s alert to the trade-offs that happen whenever language shifts registers, crosses borders, gets translated, or even moves from thought into sentence. “Linguistic transition” can mean literal translation (Hacker has lived between languages and cultures), but it also signals the everyday code-switching of a life: the way a self gets revised depending on who’s listening. Syntax matters because it’s where power hides: what gets foregrounded, what’s subordinated, what becomes passive, what’s allowed to be the subject of a sentence.

The subtext is an ethic of attention. If meaning is negotiated rather than fixed, then reading and writing become moral acts: you’re responsible for what your words imply, not only what you intended. Hacker’s fascination isn’t abstract linguistics; it’s the poet’s recognition that ambiguity is the medium of intimacy and misfire alike - the space where art can happen, and where people can be misunderstood on purpose.