Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s line performs a neat bit of intellectual honesty: it admits what every serious translator feels but rarely says out loud. Translation and original poetry are clearly related - anyone who has wrestled a line across languages knows the work is inseparable from rhythm, image, and voice - yet the nature of that kinship won’t sit still long enough to be theorized. The shrug, “but what it is I just don’t know,” isn’t ignorance so much as refusal. He’s pushing back against tidy hierarchies (translation as “secondary”) and against the opposite fantasy (translation as pure authorship). The relationship exists, he grants; the category labels don’t quite help.

Context matters: Fitzgerald is best known for English versions of Homer and Virgil, projects that demand both scholarship and a poet’s ear. Epic translation is a marathon of choices: where to be literal, where to bend; how to carry music without importing anachronism; how to make something live in a contemporary mouth. That’s already “making,” but it’s making under constraint, like composing a sonnet whose rules were written in another millennium.

The subtext is a quiet defense of craft. By feigning uncertainty, Fitzgerald highlights that the real connection isn’t abstract but procedural: the translator learns composition by intimate imitation, by rebuilding a poem from the inside. And that rebuilding changes the builder. His line flatters neither camp; it insists the most consequential part of art often happens in the part you can’t diagram.