"The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it"
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Translation, in Fitzgerald's framing, isn't a stunt act. It's a practical problem with a deceptively radical premise: the original language wasn't "ancient" to the people who spoke it. It was ordinary, frictionless, invisible. By insisting on that taken-for-granted quality, Fitzgerald pushes back against the museum-glass approach to classics, where strangeness gets fetishized as authenticity and difficulty becomes a badge of seriousness.
The slyness sits in the last line: "Nothing strange about it". It's a provocation aimed at readers who approach Homer or Virgil like tourists approaching ruins. Fitzgerald is arguing that the real oddity is our posture, not their world. The translator's job, then, isn't to preserve quaintness or sprinkle archaisms like powdered sugar. It's to recover the original's normalcy - the way it moved, joked, boasted, lamented - so that imagination can do its work without the static of reverence.
Context matters: Fitzgerald made his reputation translating The Odyssey and The Aeneid for modern English readers. Mid-century American letters were hungry for "accessible" classics, but accessibility risked being confused with flattening. Fitzgerald splits the difference by treating translation as cultural time travel with a strict rule: don't turn living speech into dead ornament. The subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic. If we keep pretending the past was naturally opaque, we give ourselves permission to not really listen to it.
The slyness sits in the last line: "Nothing strange about it". It's a provocation aimed at readers who approach Homer or Virgil like tourists approaching ruins. Fitzgerald is arguing that the real oddity is our posture, not their world. The translator's job, then, isn't to preserve quaintness or sprinkle archaisms like powdered sugar. It's to recover the original's normalcy - the way it moved, joked, boasted, lamented - so that imagination can do its work without the static of reverence.
Context matters: Fitzgerald made his reputation translating The Odyssey and The Aeneid for modern English readers. Mid-century American letters were hungry for "accessible" classics, but accessibility risked being confused with flattening. Fitzgerald splits the difference by treating translation as cultural time travel with a strict rule: don't turn living speech into dead ornament. The subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic. If we keep pretending the past was naturally opaque, we give ourselves permission to not really listen to it.
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| Topic | Writing |
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