Love Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Translation, for Robert Fitzgerald, isn’t a side hustle to poetry; it’s a contact sport. His “heart of the matter” isn’t fidelity in the courtroom sense, where the translator swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. It’s the live-wire exchange between two acts of making: building a poem in English while simultaneously answering to a poem in a language you “understand and value.” That last clause matters. Understanding is technical competence; valuing is allegiance. Fitzgerald is telling you that without both, you get something fluent but hollow: a poem-shaped product that has never risked intimacy with the original.

The subtext is a quiet rejection of the idea that translation is primarily explanatory. He’s not interested in paraphrase, summary, or “bringing content across.” He’s insisting on a creative reciprocity where English isn’t a transparent window but an instrument with its own constraints, music, and temptations. “Direct interaction” implies friction: compromises, losses, compensations, and the kind of hard listening that changes the translator’s English as much as it carries over the source.

Contextually, Fitzgerald sits in the 20th-century boom of major Anglophone translations of classics (his Homer is the famous case), when translators were increasingly treated as authors, not stenographers. His blunt closer, “I don’t see how you can do it otherwise,” is an aesthetic ultimatum: if you’re not writing a real English poem under the pressure of a real non-English poem, you’re not translating. You’re just rewriting with training wheels.